NEC Showcases World's Most Powerful Commercial Computer

[Unknown Soldier]

NEC last week began offering a new supercomputer the company claims will be able to challenge supercomputers from IBM and Cray. The new product will officially be unveiled during the iExpo2007 event in Reno, Nevada next month, with a public appearance scheduled for Tokyo later in the year.

The SX-9, according to NEC, is able to calculate a peak processing performance of 839 teralops - 839 trillion floating point operations per second. Its size is equivalent to an instant passport photo booth and will cost around $26,000 per month to rent. SX-9 will be about 13 times faster and have higher energy efficiency than its SX-8 predecessor, according to NEC.

"The SX-9 has been developed to meet the need for ultra-fast simulations of advanced and complex large-capacity scientific computing," NEC said in an official statement.

NEC has sold more than 1,000 supercomputers from the SX line of products. The company hopes to sell at least 700 SX-9 servers through 2010.

Read More: DailyTech

 

[PC-Engine]

http://www.top500.org/blog/2007/10/27/nec_sx_9_supercomputer_worlds_fastest_839_tflops

NEC has announced the NEC SX-9 claiming it to be the fastest vector computer, with single core speeds of up to 102.4 GFLOPS and up to 1.6TFLOPS on a single node incorporating multiple CPUs.

 

[Davros]

what exactly is a "vector computer" and how does it differ from a normal computer ?

 

[Simon F]

what exactly is a "vector computer" and how does it differ from a normal computer ?

A vector computer has instructions that do things like "take this array of N floats and add it to another array of N floats to produce a new vector". Because there is no dependencies here, it can do this very quickly** (assuming the memory bandwidth is available).

** i.e. a very high throughput probably using a high clock rate and a highly pipelined FPU. The latency might be very poor but that doesn't matter.

 

[Davros]

thanks from what i can gather from wiki a vector computer is designed to do SIMD really well ?