Numerical Wind Tunnel

The Numerical Wind Tunnel, abbreviated NWT, was a parallel vector supercomputer built for the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan in partnership with Fujitsu and put into operation in early 1993. Miyoshi Hajime led the laboratory side of the project, whose aim was to run full-scale compressible viscous flow simulations for aircraft design at more than one hundred times the speed of the earlier FACOM VP-400. Its design joined vector processors through crossbar networks, with memory distributed across the nodes but presented to Fortran programmers as one global address space. The finished machine had 166 processing elements of 1.7 gigaflops each, two control computers, about 44.5 gigabytes of main memory and a peak of 280 gigaflops. Its processor boards used gallium arsenide chips, and the museum record says it is believed to be the only practical computer to have done so. The TOP500 project rated it the most powerful supercomputer site in the world from 1993 to 1995. It served turbulence research and work on the HOPE-X spaceplane and the NEXST supersonic jet, stayed in use for nine years, and Fujitsu based its commercial VPP500 supercomputer on the project.