APPLICATIONS

NEC Corporation's SX-9 supercomputer, which began operation at Tohoku University's Cyber Science Center (Sendai City, Miyagi prefecture, Japan; Hiroaki Kobayashi, Director) in March 2008, has achieved the world's fastest standing in the High Performance Computing (HPC) field through scoring top marks on 19 of 28 areas in the HPC Challenge Benchmark test. The HPC Challenge Benchmark, financed by the U.S. government, was created by a team of HPC authorities led by Dr. Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The HPC Benchmark complements the Linpack Benchmark, which is used to rank the performance of the world's top 500 supercomputers, and was established in order to measure the performance of supercomputers from a diverse range of viewpoints. The HPC Challenge Benchmark evaluates computing performance from 28 different comprehensive areas, which includes 7 categories, the Linpack Benchmark, and fundamental factors on memory, networks and application software. The results released today reflect testing carried out by HPC Challenge Benchmark programs on NEC's SX-9 supercomputer. Among the 28 areas evaluated, the SX-9 recorded world leading marks in the following: 8 areas of memory bandwidth (STREAM) both for a single CPU and in a parallel environment; 5 areas of inter-process data transfer rate (Bandwidth); 2 areas of processing performance in matrix-matrix multiply (DGEMM), 2 areas of FFT and 2 areas for random memory access for a single CPU and a parallel environment. Looking forward, NEC will continue its drive to provide world leading supercomputers that secure top placement in the HPC Challenge Benchmark.