NEWS BRIEFS
Tokyo, JAPAN — NEC announced that the Yukawa Institute of Theoretical Physics of Kyoto University placed an order for an SX-5/4C parallel vector supercomputer. The system is from the newly enhanced SX-5 Series and provides 40 GFLOPS (billions of floating point operations) peak performance from its 4 processors.
The Institute has ambitious goals of utilizing the new supercomputer for developing more accurate computer models of phenomenon ranging from the micro structures of elementary particles to large-scale structures such as the cosmos. Researchers at the Yukawa Institute specialize in areas of theoretical physics including elementary particle physics, solid state physics, complex systems physics, and astrophysics.
Because of the wide ranging research being conducted, the Institute has selected multiple systems types to enhance their computational resources. In addition to the SX-5 parallel vector supercomputer, the installation will include three NEC TX7 Scalable Servers, an SGI SN-MIPS server, and a Compaq Computer ES40. Each system excels in supporting various requirements of the Institute, and are fully complementary to each other in the overall environment.
The SX-5 supercomputer provides the unrivaled computational capability necessary to support the Institute’s highly competitive research needing results in short time frames, which is enabled by the pure power of the system coupled with ease of programming because of its uniquely high performance shared main memory and automatic parallelization features. The various servers provide computational capacity for smaller modeling problems as well as utility functions such as facility-level file management and database services. The new SX-5 Series system will begin operation in January, 2001.
The Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics was founded in 1949 when Yukawa Hall (formerly known as the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics) was established. The Institute’s first director, Dr.Hideki Yukawa, of Kyoto University, was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces.” This was the first Nobel prize to ever be awarded to any Japanese citizen. Since then, the institute has become a major international collaborator for research in theoretical physics. For more information on the Institute, visit http://www.yukawa.kyoto-u.ac.jp .
The NEC Solutions Unit of NEC Corporation of Japan provides solutions for the needs of computational requirements spanning personal computers, servers, and technical computing. NEC is today considered a leading supplier of parallel vector supercomputer technology worldwide and is one of the major high performance Scalable Server providers. For more information on NEC Corporation please visit http://www.nec-global.com . For information and contacts for the SX-5 Series Parallel Vector Supercomputer visit http://www.hstc.necsyl.com .
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