Numerical Wind Tunnel ( Rus. Digital wind tunnel ; jap. 数 値 風洞 ) is a vector parallel supercomputer created in 1993 in Japan. The fruit of the collaboration of the Japanese National Aerospace Laboratory And Fujitsu . Put into operation in January 1993. Used to solve a wide range of applied aerodynamic problems using digital modeling , showing stable performance close to 100 Gflops .
It was the first supercomputer in history that overstepped the barrier of 100 Gflops on a Linpack test. In the period from November 1993 to June 1994, with its 140 vector processors, was the most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the Linpack test, occupying the top line of the TOP500 rating with the results of Rmax 124.2 Gflops and Rpeak 235.8 Gflops. [1] . In June 1994, he lost first place, but after increasing the number of processors to 166, he returned to first place with a score of 170 Gflops and remained in the top line of the list until December 1995 [2] .
Content
Creation History
Numerical Wind Tunnel (NWT) was created with the goal of achieving performance 100 times greater than the most powerful FACOM VP-400 machine available to the laboratory. This would allow solving the Navier – Stokes equations with a million points in 10 minutes.
On the basis of the NWT project development, Fujitsu in September 1992 released the commercial supercomputer VPP500 , which is one of the few examples of the successful use of gallium arsenide in the construction of computer systems.
Description
In the final version, after the upgrade, the NWT consisted of 166 processor elements (processors), each with a capacity of 1.7 Gflops, a total RAM of 44.5 GB and two control computers. Each processor element contained CPU and memory modules. The CPU board contained BIS microcircuits created using several technologies: BiCMOS , ECL and based on gallium arsenide , which at that time was considered a promising material for the creation of future supercomputers.
- Time per clock: 9.5 ns (on the LSI of gallium arsenide, it was possible to achieve a switching time of 60 ps [2] ).
- Cooling: two-stage air cooling system: the first system cooled the boards with microcircuits, and the second brought the heat out of the building.
- Operating system on processor elements and control computers: UXP (based on UNIX SVR4 ).
- Programming languages: NWT-Fortran, Fortran-77 , Fortran-90 , C.
- Power and power consumption : 1000 kVA (3 kW per processor element).
Notes
- ↑ Sublist Generator Unsolved . top500.org. The appeal date is November 21, 2012.
- ↑ 1 2 no. 1 system in November 1993 and November 1994 to December 1995 .
Links
- Card Numerical Wind Tunnel on TOP500 site
- Description of the supercomputer on the website of the IPSJ Computer Museum virtual museum of the Japanese Information Processing Society