Numerical Wind Tunnel

Also known as NWT

Operated by National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan at National Aerospace Laboratory, Chofu .

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: 124.0 GFlop/s
Rpeak: 235.8 GFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 52.6%
Cores: 140
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	- Fujitsu	Fujitsu 6702TSE	-	Verified	museum.ipsj.or.jp netlib.org
CPU	Fujitsu VPP500 vector processing element CPUs Fujitsu vector · 1C · 0.105 GHz · GaAs Fujitsu VPP500 vector processor	Fujitsu 6702TSE	140 reported	Verified	netlib.org museum.ipsj.or.jp
Interconnect	Fujitsu VPP500 crossbar Interconnect Full crossbar · 400 MB/s per direction VPP500 crossbar	Fujitsu 6702TSE	-	Reported	netlib.org museum.ipsj.or.jp
Cooling	Conduction-cooled liquid (primary/secondary loop) Cooling Sealed primary loop at the package, secondary loop rejecting outdoors Primary/secondary liquid cooling loop	Fujitsu 6702TSE	-	Verified	museum.ipsj.or.jp netlib.org
Operating system	Fujitsu UXP Operating systems Unix (SVR4-derived), Fujitsu-customised · Proprietary CP/PE operating system UXP (based on UNIX SVR4)	Fujitsu 6702TSE	-	Reported	museum.ipsj.or.jp

The read

The machine that held the top of the list from November 1993 into 1995, and the reason the early graph is not simply an American story. NAL and Fujitsu co-designed it, so the supplier relationship runs in both directions: the VPP500 that Fujitsu later sold commercially was built on technology developed for this one customer. Its processors are gallium arsenide rather than CMOS, which is the clearest marker of how differently the performance problem was solved before density took over. NAL itself no longer exists: it merged into JAXA in October 2003, which makes it the earliest case in the dataset where the operator, not the vendor, is the entity that had to be resolved.

Timeline

1993-01 First operational source
1993-11 List debut at #1 (November 1993) source
2002 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

National Aerospace Laboratory, Chofu

Location: Chofu, Japan
Commissioned: 1993

museum.ipsj.or.jp netlib.org

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
museum.ipsj.or.jp	names system and part	Fujitsu VPP500 vector processing element, Fujitsu VPP500 crossbar
netlib.org	names system, part and count	Fujitsu VPP500 vector processing element, Fujitsu VPP500 crossbar · counts: 140

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