Those latest IBM, Intel, HP and AMD CPUs are all nice powerful chips. But when it comes to the CAPABILITY computing (as opposed to capacity computing), we the Americans have gotten a little too proud of our off-the-shelf, general-purpose CPU chips -- falsely believing for too long that massively paralleling them would result in the world's most powerful supercomputers. That was a big mistake...
According to the prestigeous
TOP500 listings, the 40-TFLOPS
Earth Simulator, based on the vector-processor chips custom-made by NEC (sort of like the Cray chips), will remain unchallenged for the next 2 years or so. Moreover, the real surprise is that this machine can actually maintain ~70% of its peak FLOPS when running the real-world weather simulation applications -- a far cry from 10-20% figures often seen in American massively parallel systems based on the off-the-shelf CPU chips.
In case you are wondering, the NEC chips run at a whopping 500MHz clock. As for the operating system, the Earth Simulator runs a version of NEC's Unix, with some custom extensions.
