NEC Announces First Orders for SX-ACE Vector Supercomputer

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

NECToday NEC announced the first three orders for the SX-ACE, it’s latest vector supercomputer. The first customers for the system will be the Cyberscience Center of Tohoku University, the Cybermedia Center (CMC) of Osaka University, and the National Institute for Environmental Studies,

The SX-ACE is a new vector supercomputer equipped with a multi-core vector CPU, which enables the world’s top-level single-core performance of 64 GFLOPS and the largest memory bandwidth per core of 64 GB/s. Its performance per rack has improved 10 times over previous models, with a rack computing performance of 16 Teraflops and a memory bandwidth of 16 Tbytes/second. 

Specifications:

  • Performance of 256 GFLOPS per CPU with 64-bit precision. A node is built from one CPU and 64 GByte of memory.
  • Four vector cores of 64 GFlops each per CPU, with 256 GByte/s bandwidth to the memory. Each individual core can realize this bandwidth individually.
  • Drastically reduced latency of memory access, an important improvement compared to the SX-9.
  • The architecture of the core is an enhancement of the SX-9-CPU.
  • A rack contains 64 nodes, 16 TFlops peak, one order of magnitude faster than a rack SX-9.
  • Proprietary interconnect technology, so-called IXS, realizing low latency and high bandwidth.
  • Hybrid cooling, the CPU is contact-cooled, while the remaining components are air-cooled.
  • New parallel and highly scalable filesystem (ScaTeFS) and Batch-Scheduler capable of supporting hybrid configurations made of SX-ACE and LINUX-Clusters (NEC LX-series) to enable the hybrid usage of vector and scalar systems even for most challenging workflows and under critical operational conditions.

According to NEC, the new system employs leading edge LSI technology, high-density packaging, and high-efficiency cooling technologies to reduces power consumption by 90 of previous systems.