NEC SX architecture

An SX-5 on display at the Australian Technology Park

The SX series are vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. There have been seven generations of SX systems since the first models, the SX-1 and SX-2, were announced in April 1983. Since the late 1990s, the SX series has been amongst the most advanced of vector supercomputers. The Earth Simulator, which is built from SX-6 nodes, was the fastest supercomputer from 2002 to 2004 on the LINPACK benchmark, achieving 35.86 TFLOPS. For his work on the SX series, Tadashi Watanabe received the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 1998 and the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2006. Starting in 2001, Cray marketed the SX-5 and SX-6 exclusively in the US and non-exclusively elsewhere for a short time.

SX Series systems

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 a regular SMP arrangement.

Single node SX systems

	SX-2	SX-3	SX-4	SX-5	SX-6	SX-7	SX-8	SX-8R	SX-9	SX-ACE
Max. CPUs	1	4	32	16	8	32	8	8	16	1
Peak CPU GFLOPS	1.3	5.5	2	8	8	8.83	16	35.2	102.4	256
Peak system GFLOPS	1.3	22	64	128	64	282	128	281.6	1638	256
Max. main memory	256 MB	2 GB	16 GB	128 GB	64 GB	256 GB	128 GB	256 GB	1 TB	1 TB
System memory B/W (GB/s)	11	44	512	1,024	256	1,129	512	563.2	4,096	256
Memory B/W per CPU (GB/s)	11	22	16	64	32	35.3	64	70.4	256	256

Multi-node SX systems

	SX-4	SX-4A	SX-5	SX-6	SX-8	SX-8R	SX-9	SX-ACE
Max. nodes	16	16	32	128	512	512	512	512
Max. CPUs	512	256	512	1,024	4,096	4,096	8,192	512
Peak TFLOPS	1	0.5	4	8	65	140.8	839	131
Max. main memory	256 GB	512 GB	4 TB	8 TB	64 TB	128 TB	512 TB	32 TB
Total memory B/W (TB/s)	8	4	32	32	131	281.6	2,048	131

Current system

The SX-ACE is the current model. Each SX-ACE CPU has a peak performance of 256 GFLOPS and can address up to 1 TB of memory. A single CPU makes up a node, and the system can scale to 512 nodes. ^[1]

Software environment

Most SX supercomputers run the SUPER-UX operating system (OS), 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. A port of GCC is also available for the platform.

References

1. SX-ACE Brochure

External links

• NEC's High Performance Computing page