NEC to upgrade the Earth Simulator

[sawyl]

In case anyone hasn't been paying attention, NEC have won a contract to double the compute capacity of the Earth Simulator. The press release says:

The new system principally consists of a main system supercomputer, sub-system units and an operation management system, and is designed to deliver a system-wide peak performance of 131TFLOPS (TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second). Effective application performance is scheduled to increase two-fold on the existing Earth Simulator.

By my guesstimate, this works out at something like 80 SX-9 nodes for 131 TFLOPS, which is an eighth of the current node count. Something that should do wonders for their electricity bills...