GOVERNMENT

NEC has announced that it has delivered four vector supercomputer "SX-6"systems to the University of Victoria in Canada. In addition, it has received orders for two vector supercomputer systems of "SX-6/5A" from Ouranos Consortium in Montreal, Canada. Both transactions were through Cray. The delivered systems are NEC's "SX-6/8A" with a peak vector performance of 72 GFLOP/s - 72 billion floating-point operations per second, main memory capacity: 32 GB). These SX-6 systems will be installed at University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and will be utilized for climate and paleo climate research conducted in Western Canada. The SX-6 will also be used to study the changes in the Earth's climate changes over the past 13,000 years as well as climates' influences on human beings. The required time for the analysis of climatic simulations of the past 20,000 years on current computing systems is six months. However, the new SX-6 systems are expected to complete the same analysis in just one week, twenty times faster than conventional systems. In addition, Ouranos Consortium has ordered two systems, with a third SX-6/8A" to be added in February 2005. Ouranos was established in 2002 to deal with problems brought about by the climate's changes in North America and to explore its related conditions. Cooperating with the government of Quebec, Hydro-Quebec (power/electric company), the Meteorological Service of Canada, and Valorisation-Recherche Quebec, a non-profit governmental organization which subsidizes research conducted by universities. Ouranos Consortium will utilize the supercomputers for a variety of purposes including; building a database on past climates, developing climate models of the Canadian region, researching climate simulation, generating medium to long term reference climate scenarios, predicting climate, and developing a statistical analysis method on climate changes. "SX-6" is expected to contribute to significant time reduction in climate modeling from 50 hours (on a scalar computing system) to 40 minutes. Vector computing machines feature high CPU performance and high data transfer speed between memory and CPU, thus offering high sustained performance in large-scale computations. The "SX-6" has achieved high sustained performance by employing state-of-the-art high performance DRAM and a high-speed memory network crossbar switch. NEC has achieved over three hundred worldwide sales of the SX-6 from wide a variety of industries such as meteorology, climate, aerospace, and automobile.