Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has introduced a new terascale SMP-cluster-type parallel supercomputer system as Numerical Simulator III (NS-III) for aerospace science and engineering research purposes. The system has been in full operation since October 2002. This system is using Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER HPC2500 as main compute engine; it has computing capability 9.3 tflop/s peak performance and 3.6 TB of user memory, with about 1,800 scalar processors for computation. It has mass storage consisting of 57 TB disk storage and a 620 TB tape library. A visualization system is tightly integrated with the computation system. In this paper, we give a brief review for the history of the Numerical Simulator first, then we describe the system configuration in detail as well as the requirement and design of the NS-III. Next, we present the performance evaluation results of the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER HPC2500 system both for micro- and kernel-benchmarks and aerospace CFD applications used at JAXA, and finally we will discuss how we use the system efficiently.

Abstract VPP Fortran is a data parallel language that has been designed for the VPP series of supercomputers. In addition to pure data parallelism, it contains certain low‐level features that were designed to extract high performance from user programs. A comparison of VPP Fortran and High‐Performance Fortran (HPF) 2.0 shows that these low‐level features are not available in HPF 2.0. The features include asynchronous inter‐processor communication, explicit shadow, and the LOCAL directive. They were shown in VPP Fortran to be very useful in handling real‐world applications, and they have been included in the HPF/JA extensions. They are described in the paper. The HPF/JA Language Specification Version 1.0 is an extension of HPF 2.0 to achieve practical performance for real‐world applications and is a result of collaboration in the Japan Association for HPF (JAHPF). Some practical programming and tuning procedures with the HPF/JA Language Specification are described, using the NAS Parallel Benchmark BT as an example. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.