Hardware technology of the Earth Simulator

This paper describes the hardware technologies of the supercomputer system The Earth Simulator, which has the highest performance in the world and was developed by ESRDC (the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center)/NEC. The Earth Simulator has adopted NEC's leading edge technologies such as most advanced device technology and process technology to develop a high-speed and high-integrated LSI resulting in a one-chip vector processor. By combining this LSI technology with various advanced hardware technologies including high-density packaging, high-efficiency cooling technology against high heat dissipation and high-density cabling technology for the internal node shared memory system, ESRDC/ NEC has been successful in implementing the supercomputer system with its Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86TFLOPS, which is the world's highest performance (http://www.t.0p500.org/: the 20th TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers).