Supercomputers/Systems/Earth Simulator
Japan · decommissioned · hpc
Earth Simulator
Also known as ES
Operated by JAMSTEC at Earth Simulator Center .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 35.86 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 40.96 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 87.5%
- Cores
- 5,120
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - NEC | NEC | - | Reported | jamstec.go.jp |
| CPU | NEC SX-6 vector processor CPUs NEC vector · 1C · 0.5 GHz · 150 nm NEC SX-6 vector, 640 nodes x 8 | NEC | 5,120 reported | Reported | jamstec.go.jp |
| Interconnect | NEC Earth Simulator crossbar Interconnect Single-stage full crossbar · 12.3 GB/s per direction per node single-stage full crossbar | NEC | - | Verified | jamstec.go.jpeecg.utoronto.ca |
| Storage | NEC Earth Simulator tape library Storage Tape library, staged behind disk · More than 1.5 PB Mass Storage System cartridge tape library | NEC | - | Reported | eecg.utoronto.ca |
| Cooling | Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH) Cooling Room-level air handling · Practical ceiling around 15-20 kW per rack air cooled | NEC | - | Reported | jamstec.go.jp |
| Cooling | Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH) Cooling Room-level air handling · Practical ceiling around 15-20 kW per rack Ordinary air cooling with heat-pipe heat sinks | NEC | - | Reported | eecg.utoronto.ca |
| Operating system | NEC SUPER-UX Operating systems Unix (NEC SX-proprietary) · Proprietary enhanced version of NEC's UNIX-based OS called SUPER-UX | NEC | - | Reported | jamstec.go.jp |
The read
Held the top position by a margin wide enough to prompt a direct US policy response. 640 NEC nodes of eight SX-6 vector processors each, wired through a single-stage full crossbar: roughly 2,700 km of cable, a topology nobody has attempted at that scale since. It is the last No. 1 whose compute, interconnect and integration all came from one non-US vendor before the same pattern reappeared in China a decade later. TOP500 independently lists NEC, the SX-6 architecture, 640 nodes and 5,120 processors, and 35.86 TFlop/s LINPACK, matching JAMSTEC, so the tier is verified. The 40.96 TFlop/s Rpeak is not on that page.
Timeline
- 1997 Announced source
- 2002-03 First operational source
- 2002-06 List debut at #1 (June 2002) source
- 2009 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-19 Raised to verified on an independent second source
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system, part and count | NEC SX-6 vector processor, NEC Earth Simulator crossbar, NEC Earth Simulator tape library · counts: 5120 |
| jamstec.go.jp | names system and part | NEC Earth Simulator crossbar, NEC Earth Simulator tape library |
Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Power and cooling
Why air ran out at 20 kW a rack, how warm-water cooling removes the chillers, and what PUE conceals.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.