NEC announced the purchase of a large-scale supercomputer system consisting of 20 SX-8R vector supercomputers by the Cybermedia Center (CMC) at Osaka University.
The new system achieves a peak performance of 5.3 TFLOPS and will be the largest SX
series system acquired in Japan.
CMC plans to add a next-generation SX system in two years, whose peak performance
is expected to exceed 20 TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per
second), a performance enhancement of 16 times that of the current system of
SX-5/12M8 (peak performance: 1,280GFLOPS).
The Cybermedia Center at Osaka University was established in April 2000 and is a
joint product of the former Computing Center (CC) and related departments of Osaka
University. The center has continually deployed computing systems of the highest
levels and provided computational resources for large and high-speed calculations
to researchers in a wide range of areas across Japan, resulting in significant
achievements in large-scale simulations in multiple and varied fields.
CMC has highly evaluated NEC's system for its user-friendly programming realized by
high sustained performance and large-scale shared memory, which has been proved on
benchmark tests with the user's actual applications.
Recently, cluster systems, which consist of many CPUs connected in parallel, have
shown a great improvement in performance, achieving well in areas such as molecular
science, semiconductor design, structural analysis and bio informatics. However, in
the areas of fluid and particle analysis, vector supercomputers continue to
demonstrate absolute dominance in terms of CPU performance and calculation
efficiency when compared with cluster systems. In addition, efficiency improvement
in power consumption and installation make vector supercomputers superior in
operation cost to that of cluster systems.
NEC launched sale of the world's fastest commercial vector supercomputer SX-8R in
October 2006. The SX-8R boasts a peak vector performance of 144 TFLOPS and
demonstrates high performance in the areas of automotive performance, weather
forecasts and environment simulations, where large-scale, large-capacity data
calculations are required.