6The Current Status of the Earth Simulator

a highly parallel vector supercomputer system consisting of 640 processor nodes connected by high performance interconnection network switch system. It achieved 35.86 Teraflops (Tflops) in LINPACK benchmark test in May 2002 (Table 1). That was about 90 % of its peak perform-ance of 40.96 Tflops. As a result of this extraordinary achievement, in June 2002, the TOP500 projec