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TOKYO, JAPAN -- NEC Corporation (NEC) (NASDAQ: NIPNY) today announced the completion of its delivery of the ultra high-speed vector parallel computing system known as "the Earth Simulator," to the Earth Simulation Center (ESC, Tetsuya Sato, Director)". The system is slated to begin operation on March 11, 2002. The Earth Simulator was developed by the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center (ESRDC, Kiyoshi Asai, Director), which is a collaborative organization of the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA, Shuichiro Yamanouchi, President), Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI, Kenichi Murakami, President), and Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC, Takuya Hirano, President). The Earth Simulator system was installed in the simulator building (with floor space 50m x 65m) at Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences (Yokohama, Kanagawa) of JAMSTEC. This is the world's fastest supercomputer configured with 640 nodes (64GFLOPS/node, 5,120 CPUs in total), each of which consists of eight vector processors (8GFLOPS/CPU), and achieves the peak performance of 40TFLOPS (40 trillion floating-point operations per second). The Earth Simulator will create a "virtual planet earth" on the computer by its capability of processing vast volume of data sent from satellites, buoys and other worldwide observation point. The system will contribute to analyze and predict environmental changes on the earth through the simulation of various global scale environmental phenomena such as global warming, El Nino effect, atmospheric and marine pollution, torrential rainfall and other complicated environmental effects. It will also provide an outstanding research tool in explaining terrestrial phenomena such as tectonics and earthquakes. NEC has been committed to the project with full-scale efforts since it was initially selected to develop the basic design in 1997. Since then, NEC has engaged in a series of developments such as the technology research and development in 1998, detailed design in 1999, the manufacture and implementation of the system in 2000, leading up to the completion of the main system and start of operation this year. NEC is highly honored to be a part of the Earth Simulator project which Japan can proudly present to the world. By developing leading-edge technologies further, NEC intends to work on the tuning in the system's operability and the sustained performance with the maximum efforts for years to come.