The monthly rental price of the SX-8R will start from approximately 1,210,000 yen, and. NEC expects 200 system sales over the next year

NEC Corporation today announced the worldwide launch and availability of a new supercomputer in the SX series, model SX-8R (an enhanced version of SX-8),the world's most powerful vector supercomputer with a peak vector performance of 144 TFLOPS (TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second).

The new supercomputer contains twice as many pipelines for addition and multiplication as the SX-8 in its vector unit, the central function of a vector processor. In addition, with 10% faster clock cycles, it realizes more than double the performance of the SX-8 at 35.2GFLOPS (GFLOPS: one billion floating point operations per second). As a total system, it achieves the world's fastest speed among vector supercomputers at 144TFLOPS by mounting up to 4,096 CPUs.

NEC has already begun development of its next vector supercomputer, focusing on that of a single-chip vector processor whose performance per CPU exceeds 100GFLOPS.

An increase in performance per single core has become more challenging in the recent HPC (high performance computing) market due to the multi-core processor design that is applied to CPUs. NEC has advanced its development of a next generation vector supercomputer based on a single-chip vector processor, whose peak vector performance exceeds 100GFLOPS per CPU (single core). NEC will continue this development toward the realization of supercomputers with unparalleled sustained performance and excellent price performance in large-scale and large capacity scientific computations, utilizing leading-edge CMOS LSI and LSI design technologies.