17th October, 2006 --- NEC Corporation today announced the worldwide launch and availability of a new supercomputer in the SX series, model SX-8R (an enhanced version of SX-8),the world's most powerful vector supercomputer with a peak vector performance of 144 TFLOPS (TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second).

The new supercomputer contains twice as many pipelines for addition and multiplication as the SX-8 in its vector unit, the central function of a vector processor. In addition, with 10% faster clock cycles, it realizes more than double the performance of the SX-8 at 35.2GFLOPS (GFLOPS: one billion floating point operations per second). As a total system,, it achieves the world's fastest speed among vector supercomputers at 144TFLOPS by mounting up to 4,096 CPUs.

The monthly rental price of the SX-8R will start from approximately 1,210,000 yen, and. NEC expects 200 system sales over the next year.  NEC has already begun development of its next vector supercomputer, focusing on  that of a single-chip vector processor whose performance per CPU exceeds 100GFLOPS.

Features of the new product are described below.

1.World's fastest single-chip vector processor

Containing twice as many pipelines for addition and multiplication (o
riginally one pipeline for each), the vector unit realizes more than double the peak vector performance of the SX-8 at 35.2GFLOPS (originally 16GFLOPS).

2.World's highest computing performance of 144TFLOPS

The single-node model (includes up to 8 CPUs) achieves a peak vector performance of 281.6GFLOPS, while the multi-node model achieves the world's fastest peak vector performance of 144TFLOPS when configured with 512 nodes. In addition, it also boasts an enlarged memory capacity of up to 128TB in 512-node configuration by doubling the memory capacity up to 256GB per node. A high peak data transfer rate of 288TB/s between the CPU(s) and memory is realized, an increase of 10%.

3.Resource management function improves system availability NEC released a new scheduler "JobManipulator," which maximizes system availability by a planned resource management function. Based on the required amount of resource (CPU, memory, etc.) and a user's execution time of programs (jobs), it offers back fill scheduling, which means systematically distributing the computation resource required for job execution and enabling a user to occupy the entire resource.

In 1983, NEC entered the market of supercomputers with the launch of SX-2. This was the world's first supercomputer to achieve a performance exceeding 1GFLOPS. Since then, NEC has received over 1,000 orders for the SX series owing to their sustained performance and excellent price performance from high-end users in climate, aerospace and automotive industries.

An increase in performance per single core has become more challenging in the recent HPC (high performance computing) market due to the multi-core processor design that is applied to CPUs. NEC has advanced its development of a next generation vector supercomputer based on a singe-chip vector processor, whose peak vector performance exceeds 100GFLOPS per CPU (single core). NEC will continue this development toward the realization of supercomputers with unparalleled sustained performance and excellent price performance in large-scale and large capacity scientific computations, utilizing leading-edge CMOS LSI and LSI design technologies.

Please refer to the appendix for the specifications of the SX-8R.
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0610/1701-01.html