SX-8R : The NIES in Japan just got 16 Super Computers at 4.096 TeraFLOPS

The National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), a Japanese government organization, broke their piggy bank to buy no less than 16 NEC SX-8R Super Computers. Each computer provides 4.096 TeraFLOPS of computing power. NIES didn’t buy those to break new records at Minesweeper or encode DivX videos on the fly, but to make complex environmental calculations about global warming.