The first generation of Earth Simulator, developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator Project", was a highly parallel vector
supercomputer system for running
global climate models to evaluate the
effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics. The system was developed for
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency,
Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and
Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC) in 1997. Construction started in October 1999, and the site officially opened on 11 March 2002. The project cost 60 billion
yen. Built by
NEC, ES was based on their
SX-6 architecture. It consisted of 640 nodes with eight
vector processors and 16
gigabytes of
computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120
processors and 10
terabytes of memory. Two nodes were installed per 1 metre × 1.4 metre × 2 metre cabinet. Each cabinet consumed 20 kW of power. The system had 700
terabytes of
disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6
petabytes of
mass storage in
tape drives. It was able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the oceans down to a resolution of 10 km. Its performance on the
LINPACK benchmark was 35.86
TFLOPS, which was almost five times faster than the previous fastest supercomputer,
ASCI White. ES was the
fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. Its capacity was surpassed by
IBM's
Blue Gene/L prototype on 29 September 2004. == Earth Simulator (second generation) ==