NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC . This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992–1993, and 2002–2004. The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA .
13-521: The SX-9 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation . The SX-9 Series implements an 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-9 processors run at 3.2 GHz , with eight-way replicated vector pipes, each having two multiply units and two addition units; this results in a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS . For non-vectorized code, there
26-664: A letter suffix. The SX-1 and SX-2 ran the ACOS-4 based SX-OS. The SX-3 onwards run the SUPER-UX operating system (OS); the Earth Simulator runs a custom version of this OS. SUPER-UX comes with Fortran and C++ compilers . Cray has also developed an Ada compiler which is available as an option. Some vertical applications are available through NEC, but in general customers are expected to develop much of their own software. In addition to commercial applications, there
39-687: A regular SMP arrangement. The SX-5 was announced and shipped in 1998, with the SX-6 following in 2001, and the SX-7 in 2002. Starting in 2001, Cray marketed the SX-5 and SX-6 exclusively in the US, and non-exclusively elsewhere for a short time. The Earth Simulator , built from SX-6 nodes, was the fastest supercomputer from June 2002 to June 2004 on the LINPACK benchmark , achieving 35.86 TFLOPS . The SX-9
52-490: A single processor. 100 LSI ICs were housed in a single multi chip module to achieve 2 million gates per module. The modules were watercooled. The SX-4 series was announced in 1994, and first shipped in 1995. Since the SX-4, SX series supercomputers are constructed in a doubly parallel manner. A number of central processing units (CPUs) are arranged into a parallel vector processing node. These nodes are then installed in
65-425: Is a scalar processor that runs at half the speed of the vector unit, i.e. 1.6 GHz. Up to 16 CPUs and 1 terabyte of memory may be used in a single node. Each node is packaged in an air-cooled cabinet, similar in size to a standard 42U computer rack. The SX-9 series ranges from the single-node SX-9/B system with 4 CPUs to the maximum expansion stage with 512 nodes, 8,192 CPUs, and 970 TFLOPS peak performance. There
78-646: Is a wide body of free software for the UNIX environment which can be compiled and run on SUPER-UX, such as Emacs , and Vim . A port of GCC is also available for the platform. The SX-Aurora TSUBASA PCIe card is running in a Linux machine, the Vector Host (VH), which provides operating system services to the Vector Engine (VE). The VE operating system VEOS runs in user space on the VH. Applications compiled for
91-621: Is up to 4 TB/s shared memory bandwidth per node and 2×128 GB/s node interconnect bandwidth. The operating system is NEC's SUPER-UX , a Unix-like OS. The SX-9 had the world's fastest vector CPU core. A fully equipped system with 512 nodes would have been the world's fastest supercomputer at the time of release in the first quarter of 2008, with a performance of 819 TFLOPS. The SX-9 was discontinued in 2015. The German national meteorological service ( DWD ) operated two independent SX-9 clusters, with 976 processors, 31,232 GB of RAM and 98 TFLOPS performance in total. NEC SX The first models,
104-585: The General Comprehensive Operating System family developed by General Electric , Honeywell , and Bull . Two of these systems, ACOS-2 (based on GCOS 4) and ACOS-4 (based on GCOS 7) are still sold, although only ACOS-4 is under active development. ACOS-6 (based on GCOS 8) is an obsolete high-end mainframe platform, which ceased active development in the early 2000s. The first two models in NEC's SX series of supercomputers ,
117-617: The SX-1 and SX-2, were announced in April 1983, and released in 1985. The SX-2 was the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop . The SX-1 and SX-1E were less powerful models offered by NEC. The SX-3 was announced in 1989, and shipped in 1990. The SX-3 allows parallel computing using both SIMD and MIMD . It also switched from the ACOS-4 based SX-OS, to the AT&;T System V UNIX -based SUPER-UX operating system. In 1992 an improved variant,
130-536: The SX-1 and the SX-2 (released in 1985), ran an operating system derived from ACOS-4, which was variously called either SX-OS or SXCP (SX System Control Program). However, subsequent SX supercomputers, starting with the SX-3 (released in 1990), instead ran a derivative of Unix. In late September 2012, NEC announced a return from IA-64 to the previous NOAH line of proprietary mainframe processors for ACOS-4, now produced in
143-516: The SX-3R, was announced. A SX-3/44 variant was the fastest computer in the world between 1992-1993 on the TOP500 list. It had LSI integrated circuits with 20,000 gates per IC with a per-gate delay time of 70 picoseconds, could house 4 arithmetic processors with up to 4 sharing the same main memory, and up to several processors to achieve up to 22 GFLOPS of performance, with 1.37 GFLOPS of performance with
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#1732790671660156-602: The VE can use almost all Linux system calls, they are transparently forwarded and executed on the VH. The components of VEOS are licensed under the GNU General Public License . Advanced Comprehensive Operating System Advanced Comprehensive Operating System ( ACOS ) is a family of mainframe computer operating systems developed by NEC for the Japanese market. It consists of three systems, based on
169-587: Was introduced in 2007 and discontinued in 2015. Tadashi Watanabe has been NEC's lead designer for the majority of SX supercomputer systems. For this work he received the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 1998 and the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2006. Each system has multiple models, and the following table lists the most powerful variant of each system. Further certain systems have revisions, identified by
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