NEC SX-8

The SX-8 is a supercomputer built by NEC Corporation. The SX-8 Series implements an eight-way SMP system in a compact node module and uses an enhanced version of the single chip vector processor that was introduced with the SX-6. The NEC SX-8 processors run at 2 GHz for vectors and 1 GHz for scalar operations. The SX-8 CPU operates at 16 GFLOPS and can address up to 128 GB of memory. Up to 8 CPUs may be used in a single node, and a complete system may have up to 512 nodes. The SX-8 series ranges from the single-CPU SX-8b system to the SX-8/4096M512, with 512 nodes, 4,096 CPUs, and a peak performance of 65 TFLOPS. There is up to 512 GB/s bandwidth per node (64 GB/s per processor). The SX-8 runs SUPER-UX, a Unix-like operating system developed by NEC.

The first production SX-8 was installed at the UK Met Office in early 2005.[1] In October 2006, an upgraded SX-8 was announced, the SX-8R. The NEC SX-8R processors run at 2.2 GHz for vectors and 1.1 GHz for scalar operations. The SX-8R can process double the amount of vector operations per clock compared to the SX-8. The SX-8R CPU has a peak vector performance 35.2 GFLOPS (10% frequency increase and double the number of vector operations) and can address up to 256 GB of memory in a single node (up from 128 GB).

The French national meteorological service, Météo-France, rents a SX-8R for 3.7 million euros a year.

NEC Published Product Highlights

See also

References

  1. "Computers". Met Office. Retrieved 2011-02-05.
  2. LSI and Circuit Technologies for the SX-8 Supercomputer Jun INASAKA, Toshio TANAHASHI, Hideaki KOBAYASHI, Toshihiro KATOH, Mikihiro KAJITA, Naoya NAKAYAMA, NEC Journal of Advanced Technology, Vol. 2, No. 3, August 18, 2005



This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/26/2014. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.