Earth Simulator

On March 11, 2002, Japanese engineers switched on the most powerful supercomputer ever built. Their goal was “to create a virtual twin of our home plan- et,” says Time magazine.


Called the Earth Simulator, the computer is the size of four tennis courts and cost about $350 million. It performs over 35 trillion calculations per second, five times faster than its closest rival, an American military machine capable of 7.2 trillion calculations per second.


“By plugging real-life climate data from satellites and ocean buoys into the Earth Simulator,” says Time, “researchers can create a computer model of the entire planet, then scroll it forward in time to see what will happen to our environment.


Scientists have already completed a forecast of global ocean temperatures for the next 50 years.”