Earth Simulator 4

Also known as ES4, SX-Aurora TSUBASA

Operated by JAMSTEC at Earth Simulator Center .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 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: 9.99 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 13.45 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 74.3%
Cores: 43,776
Power: 1.39 MW
Per watt: 7.2 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 SX-Aurora TSUBASA B401-8 vector nodes plus CPU and GPU nodes	NEC 6701TSE	-	Reported	jamstec.go.jp top500.org
Accelerator	NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA Vector Engine Accelerators NEC vector · 8C · 1.6 GHz · 16 nm · 300 W SX-Aurora TSUBASA Type 20B Vector Engine, 684 nodes x8	NEC 6701TSE	5,472 reported	Reported	jamstec.go.jp nextplatform.com
Accelerator	NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB Accelerators CUDA (Ampere GA100) · 6,912C · 1.41 GHz · 7 nm · 400 W 8 GPU nodes with eight NVIDIA A100 40GiB each	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	64 estimated	Reported	jamstec.go.jp
CPU	AMD EPYC 7742 (Rome) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2.25 GHz · 7 nm · 225 W AMD EPYC 7742: 684 VE nodes x1, 720 CPU nodes x2, 8 GPU nodes x2	AMD AMDNASDAQ	2,140 estimated	Reported	jamstec.go.jp
Interconnect	NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds InfiniBand HDR200	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org hpci-office.jp

The read

Fourth-generation Earth Simulator, built by NEC: 684 vector nodes each with one AMD EPYC 7742 and eight SX-Aurora TSUBASA Type 20B vector engines (5,472 VEs, 43,776 vector cores), 720 CPU-only nodes with two EPYC 7742, and 8 GPU nodes with eight NVIDIA A100 each, on InfiniBand HDR200 with 60 PB of storage. Total peak is stated by JAMSTEC as 19.5 PFLOPS across all node types; the TOP500 entry covers the vector partition (9.99 PFLOPS Rmax, 13.45 PFLOPS Rpeak, 39th in June 2021).

Timeline

2021-03 First operational source
2021-06 List debut at #39 (June 2021) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#39: TOP500, June 2021 →

Site & facility

Earth Simulator Center

Location: Yokohama, Japan
Cooling: Air cooling
Commissioned: 2002

jamstec.go.jp

Change history

2026-10-02 Added Earth Simulator 4, JAMSTEC's SX-Aurora TSUBASA hybrid system, 39th on the June 2021 TOP500

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
jamstec.go.jp	names system, part and count	AMD EPYC 7742 (Rome), NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA Vector Engine, NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB · counts: 64
top500.org	names system and part	NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA Vector Engine, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.