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 sometimes 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
NEC SX-8R
NEC SX-9

Single Node SX Systems
	SX-2	SX-3	SX-4	SX-5	SX-6	SX-7	SX-8	SX-8R	SX-9
Max. CPUs	1	4	32	16	8	32	8	8	16
Peak CPU GFLOPS	1.3	5.5	2	8	8	8.83	16	35.2	102.4
Peak System GFLOPS	1.3	22	64	128	64	282	128	281.6	1638
Max. Main Memory	256 MB (256 MiB)	2 GB (2 GiB)	16 GB	128 GB	64 GB	256 GB	128 GB	256 GB	1 TB (1 TiB)
System Memory B/W (GB/s)	11	44	512	1024	256	1129	512	563.2	4096
Memory B/W per CPU (GB/s)	11	22	16	64	32	35.3	64	70.4	256

Multi Node SX Systems
	SX-4	SX-4A	SX-5	SX-6	SX-8	SX-8R	SX-9
Max. Nodes	16	16	32	128	512	512	512
Max. CPUs	512	256	512	1024	4096	4096	8192
Peak TFLOPS	1	0.5	4	8	65	140.8	839
Max. Main Memory	256 GB (256 GiB)	512 GB	4 TB	8 TB	64 TB	128 TB	512 TB
Total Memory B/W (TB/s)	8	4	32	32	131	281.6	2048

[edit] Latest system

The SX-9 is the current model of SX architecture supercomputer. It is the fastest vector supercomputer system on the market as of October 2007. The SX-9 CPU operates at 102.4 GFLOP/s and can address up to 1 TB of memory. Up to 16 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 Emacs, and Vim.