The Earth Simulator (ES) is a prestigious series of supercomputers deployed at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences. These machines were specifically designed to tackle some of the most complex challenges in earth sciences, including global climate modeling and solid earth geophysics.
Earth Simulator (First Generation)
The first generation of the Earth Simulator was born from a Japanese government initiative known as the "Earth Simulator Project." Developed in 1997 for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and JAMSTEC, the system officially opened on March 11, 2002, after a construction period starting in October 1999. The project represented a significant investment of 60 billion yen.
Built by NEC using the SX-6 architecture, this vector supercomputer consisted of 640 nodes. Each node featured eight vector processors and 16 gigabytes of memory, totaling 5,120 processors and 10 terabytes of memory. The hardware was housed in cabinets measuring 1 metre × 1.4 metre × 2 metre, with each cabinet consuming 20 kW of power. The system boasted 700 terabytes of disk storage and 1.6 petabytes of mass storage via tape drives.
The first ES was capable of running holistic simulations of global climate—covering both the atmosphere and oceans—at a resolution of 10 km. With a LINPACK benchmark performance of 35.86 TFLOPS, it was nearly five times faster than the previous record-holder, ASCI White, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 until September 2004, when it was surpassed by IBM's Blue Gene/L prototype.
Earth Simulator (Second Generation)
In March 2009, the original system was replaced by the Earth Simulator 2 (ES2). Based on the NEC SX-9/E system, ES2 utilized a quarter of the nodes of its predecessor, but each node provided 12.8 times the performance. This was achieved through a 3.2× increase in clock speed and four times the processing resources per node.
ES2 reached a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS and a delivered LINPACK performance of 122.4 TFLOPS, making it one of the most efficient supercomputers of its era. In November 2010, NEC announced that ES2 topped the Global FFT measure of the HPC Challenge Awards with 11.876 TFLOPS.
Earth Simulator (Third Generation)
The evolution continued in March 2015 with the introduction of the Earth Simulator 3 (ES3). This system, based on the NEC SX-ACE architecture, featured 5,120 nodes and achieved a performance of 1.3 PFLOPS.
Between 2017 and 2018, ES3 operated alongside Gyoukou, a specialized supercomputer utilizing immersion cooling technology capable of reaching up to 19 PFLOPS.
Earth Simulator (Fourth Generation)
The latest iteration, Earth Simulator 4 (ES4), represents a shift in architecture to maximize hybrid computing power. It utilizes AMD EPYC processors, accelerated by the NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA Vector Engine and NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPUs, combining traditional vector processing with modern GPU acceleration to push the boundaries of earth science simulations.