NEC announce world's fastest vector supercomputer

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 26 Oct 2007 at 10:31

NEC has announced a new supercomputer, which it claims will become the world's fastest vector computer. The SX-9 will have a peak processing power of 839 teraFLOPS, and feature the first CPU that exceeds 100 gigaFLOPS of peak vector performance.

The SX-9 is the latest in NEC's SX series, which has sold more than 1,000 units worldwide. While vector supercomputers have become far less popular in recent years, replaced by far cheaper cluster groups, there are still used for many applications.

"NEC's vector supercomputers are being utilised in a wide array of fields, including advanced weather forecasting, aerospace, the environment and fluid dynamics, and have won praise from universities and research organisations worldwide, as well as private corporations, for their high sustained performance and price competitiveness," says Yoshikazu Maruyama, senior vice president at NEC.

The computer will be able to access up to 1TB of memory, using interconnects to shift data at up to 128GB/second. NEC also claims improvements in power consumption and size, saving three quarters of the space of the previous SX-8 model.