NEC SX-6

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The SX-6 is a supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to 8 vector processors, which share up to 64 gibibytes of computer memory. The SX-6 processor is implemented using a 0.15μ Cu CMOS process as a single chip (The SX-5 was a multi chip implementation). Each SX-6 processor chip includes a vector processor unit and a scalar processor. The vector processor is made up of 8 vector pipeline units each with 72 vector registers (256 words each), the vector unit operations include add/shift, multiply, divide and logical operations.The scalar unit (64bit) can decode, issue and complete four instructions per clock cycle, branch prediction and speculative execute is supported, along with a 64kB cache. A multi-node system is configured by interconnecting up to 128 single-node systems via a high-speed, low latency IXS (Internode Crossbar Switch).

The peak performance of the SX-6 series vector processors is 8 GFLOPS. Thus a single-node system provides a peak performance of 64 GFLOPS, while a multi-node system provides up to 8 TFLOPS of peak floating-point performance.

The operating system is NEC's SUPER-UX Unix-like OS. A SAN based global file system (NEC's GFS) is available for a multinode installation. The default batch processing system is NQSII, but open source batch systems such as Sun Grid Engine are also supported.