It was able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the oceans down to a resolution of 10 km.

Its performance on the LINPACK benchmark was 35.86 TFLOPS, which was almost five times faster than the previous fastest supercomputer, ASCI White.

In November 2010, NEC announced that ES2 topped the Global FFT, one of the measures of the HPC Challenge Awards, with the performance number of 11.876 TFLOPS.

[4] ES3, from 2017 to 2018, ran alongside Gyoukou, a supercomputer with immersion cooling that can achieve up to 19 PFLOPS.

The Earth Simulator 4 (ES4) uses AMD EPYC processors, with acceleration by the NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA Vector Engine and NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPUs.