Earth Simulator Press Release The ultra high-speed parallel computing system, "Earth Simulator" attained the best computing performance in the world according to the Linpack benchmark test. The result of this test of execution performance, 35.61 TFlops (trillion operations per second), was approved and the Earth Simulator was registered as the world' s fastest supercomputer by Dr. Jack J. Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, USA, who announced the world Linpack benchmark test results. The Earth Simulator consists of 640 supercomputers that are connected by a high-speed network (data transfer speed; 12.3 GBytes). Each supercomputer (1 node) contains eight vector processors with a peak performance of 8GFlops and a high-speed memory of 16 GBytes. The total number of processors is 5120 (8 x 640), which translates to a total of approximately 40 TFlops peak performance, and a total main memory of 10 TeraBytes. 35.61 TFlops is achieved from the operation of 638 nodes (5,104 processors) and an efficiency performance percentage of 87.2%. According to the TOP500 list of supercomputers in the world, the second is the ASCI White system in the US, whose performance is 7.266 TFlops (peak performance 12.288 TFlops, peak performance percentage 58.8%). The Earth Simulator has five times the capacity of the US system. April 18, 2002 * TeraFlops (TFLOPS) 1 TFLOPS is a term for a trillion floating-point operations per second."Tera" is a prefix for one trillion (ten raised to the twelfth power),"giga" for one billion (ten raised to the tenth power). When the Linpack program was executed, the Earth Simulator achieved 35.61 TFLOPS, which is 35.61 trillion floating-point operations per second on average. * Linpack benchmark test A numerically intensive test that has been widely used to measure and compare the processing performance of supercomputers, and similar devices. Propounded by Dr. J. Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, the test measures the processing performance (in Gigaflops) of a computer program that solves a large-scale linear equation. * All the test results are reported and updated on the Web, with the latest results indicating that the Earth Simulator is the fastest supercomputer in the world. (Report Home Page http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.ps) * TOP500 A web site listing the sites that have the 500 most powerful computer systems installed. The best Linpack benchmark performance achieved is used as a performance measure in ranking the computers. The TOP500 list has been updated twice every year since 1993. (Homepage http://www.top500.org/) * Vector Processor A processor that executes computational operations at high speed with a single instruction. Vector processors provide high-sustained performance.