SCIENCE & ENGINEERING NEWS

Tokyo, JAPAN — The Supercomputer Marketing Promotion Division of NEC Solutions, a business unit of NEC Corporation, announced receipt of an order for a 1.28 TFLOPS scalable parallel vector (PVP) supercomputer.

The system is an SX-5/128M8 that will be installed at the Cybermedia Center of Osaka University in Japan. This 128 processor system will not only be the largest PVP ever delivered, but will also be the largest-scale system installed in Japan, exceeding even the 1.20 TFLOPS system at the High Accelerator Research Organization (KEK).

This SX-5 will be the most powerful PVP supercomputer ever delivered and rivals most supercomputers of any architecture with its peak performance rating. Based on today’s Top500 List of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, which uses Linpack performance as the sole metric for rating, this system will be the 5th most powerful.

Because PVP systems are known to deliver a higher proportion of their peak performance for most typical applications, as compared to parallel scalar systems, this machine is expected to deliver the highest sustainable performance of any non-governmental system world-wide.

The Cybermedia Center of Osaka University is a collaborative organization established in April 2000 to provide the core of the educational and research environment needed for leading-edge data processing technology. It is a successor to the University’s Computation Center, which was established in 1969. The facility thus has a long and successful history of providing leading computational resources to researchers in various fields and supporting their large-scale technical computing needs.

The new system will replace an SX-4/62M2 (128 GFLOPS) which was installed in 1996. NEC is pleased to receive this upgrade order because it confirms the University’s good experience achieving high sustainable performance, usability, reliability, and interoperability with NEC’s SX Series supercomputer products.

The Cybermedia Center, taking advantage of the opportunities this new system will provide, aims to establish an even more effective computational environment through enhanced internet supercomputing initiatives, and to make a significant enhancement of their success in the application of computational sciences supporting users who continually need more precise and larger-scale numeric simulations to maintain their world-wide competitive advantage.

This order makes 65 total SX-5 supercomputers ordered worldwide with 30 being in Japan. The fact that more than half of the systems are from the Americas, Europe, and Oceania reinforces the performance, quality, reliability, and excellent customer acceptance of the SX-5 Series system.

NEC is supplying the technical supercomputing requirements for an ever increasing number of leading industrial and research organizations doing product design, research, and applied research.

============================================================