The World’s Most Expensive Computer

The World’s Most Expensive Computer

The world’s most expensive computer is the Japanese Earth Simulator which costs $400,000,000.

Its budget was authorized for the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) and the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) in 1997.

The NEC Corporation received the winning bid for building the Earth Simulator which is the world’s most expensive computer.

The World’s Most Expensive Computer: Processors                                                                  

Each of the processor nodes in the world’s most expensive computer contains 8 vector processors running at 500MHz with 16GB of shared memory and the total main memory in the Earth Simulator is 10 terabytes. The Earth Simulator’s operating system is NEC’s UNIX-based OS called “SUPER-UX” which is used on NEC’s SX Series of supercomputers.

The world’s most expensive computer is used for various international projects most of which are related to atmospheric, climate, and oceanographic simulation.

By May 2002, the Earth Simulator which is a Japanese supercomputer and the world’s most expensive computer with 640 processor nodes was benchmarked with Linpack as having 35.86 TFlop/s performance giving it the top spot on the TOP 500 Supercomputer Sites list until 2004 when IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer took its place on the list.

The IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer uses an architecture that cost less than half as compared to the world’s most expensive computer.

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