NEC SX architecture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SX architecture is the name of a series of supercomputers developed by NEC. In the USA, they have been marketed jointly with Cray. SX supercomputers are constructed in a doubly parallel manner. A number of processors are arranged into a Parallel Vector Processing node. These nodes are then installed in a regular SMP arrangement.

1 SX Systems Family
2 Latest system
3 Software environment
4 Awards
5 External links

[edit] SX Systems Family

The SX architecture is used in the following systems:

NEC SX-2
NEC SX-3
NEC SX-4
NEC SX-5
NEC SX-6, Cray SX-6
NEC SX-7
Earth Simulator
NEC SX-8.

Single Node SX Systems
	SX-2	SX-3	SX-4	SX-5	SX-6	SX-7	SX-8	SX-8R
Max. CPUs	1	4	32	16	8	32	8	8
Peak CPU GFLOPs	1.3	5.5	2	8	8	8.83	16	35.2
Peak System GFLOPS	1.3	22	64	128	64	282	128	281.6
Max. Main Memory	256MB	2GB	16GB	128GB	64GB	256GB	128GB	256GB
System Memory B/W (GB/s)	11	44	512	1024	256	1129	512	563.2
Memory B/W per CPU (GB/s)	11	22	16	64	32	35.3	64	70.4

Multi Node SX Systems
	SX-4	SX-4A	SX-5	SX-6	SX-8
Max. Nodes	16	16	32	128	512
Max. CPUs	512	256	512	1024	4096
Peak TFLOPS	1	0.5	4	8	65
Max. Main Memory	256 GB	512 GB	4 TB	8 TB	524 TB
Total Memory B/W (TB/s)	8	4	32	32	131

[edit] Latest system

The SX-8R is the current model of SX architecture supercomputer. It is the fastest general purpose supercomputer system on the market as of October 2006. The SX-8R CPU operates at 35.2 GFLOP/s and can address up to 256 GB of memory. Up to 8 CPUs may be used in a single node, and a complete system may have up to 512 nodes.

[edit] Software environment

Most SX supercomputers run the SUPER-UX operating system, and come 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.

The Earth Simulator uses a custom OS called "ESOS" (Earth Simulator Operating System). It has many features custom designed for the Earth Simulator which are not in the regular SUPER-UX OS.

In addition to commercial applications, there is a wide body of free software for the UNIX environment which can be compiled and run on SUPER-UX, such as GCC, Emacs, and Vim.