News Item Dated: 19 December 2002
From: Associated Press  (12/16/02); Pearson, Natalie Obiko

NEC's $350 million Earth Simulator in Japan has raised the bar for other supercomputing efforts and has taken away the U.S.'s lead in the supercomputing race; it is now the world's fastest supercomputer, capable of running 35.6 trillion calculations per second and forecasting climate with unprecedented precision.

The government of Japan believes that the Earth Simulator will justify its high costs by helping people better prepare for earthquakes and potentially saving billions of dollars, but researchers say its resources could be applied to projects such as predicting the path of a pandemic, accelerating new drug discoveries, and modeling chemical interactions in the human body. However, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that the Earth Simulator has effectively ended the United States' dominance in the field of weather studies, a development that could have "potentially grave" ramifications for other computation-heavy efforts such as the DOE's national security and energy initiatives.

The American government has responded by funding domestic supercomputing initiatives that intend to wrest the lead back from Japan, including a $90 million contract with Cray to develop a machine for nuclear weapons modeling based at Sandia National Laboratories. Meanwhile, IBM is working on a 100-teraflop machine that will be the world's fastest when it is introduced in 2004, while another Cray project, a petaflop computer, is expected by the end of the decade.