INDUSTRY

NEC Corporation today announced that its vector supercomputer "SX-6" system has started operation in an Italian research organization, interuniversity Consortium for Supercomputing Applications for Universities and Research (CASPUR). Founded in 1992, CASPUR consists of eight universities located in five different cities in central and southern Italy (Rome, Viterbo, Bari, Lecce and Foggia) and one research organization in Rome (Science of Motion). Its major competitive areas includes; computational chemistry and bio-informatics, computational physics and fluid dynamics and material sciences. It also provides computing power for many other research institutions (nuclear physics, energy and environment, geophysics and Vulcan logy, and naval architecture) and as well as playing a central role in advanced Italian technology. CASPUR selected SX-6/8A (72GFLOPS of peak vector performance, 64GB main memory, 2TB disk capacity) based on the results of benchmark tests, in which "SX-6/8A" demonstrated outstanding sustained performance and scalability with a wide range of codes such as computational chemistry, computational material science, and oceanic modeling. A vector supercomputer, with high-speed computation power and large-scale memory, became vital for CASPUR's research analysis in state-of-the-art technologies, leading to the acquisition of its first vector machine. Since the vector supercomputer SX-6's first release, NEC has been engaged in its sales promotion. NEC has received over three hundred orders from research institutions in the areas of meteorology, climate, aerospace, and automobile. SX-6's performance was enhanced to 9.2TFLOPS on September 18, 2003. Vector machines boast high data transfer speed capability between large-scale memory and CPUs based on CPU performance and high sustained performance in large-scale computations. With SX-6, reduced access time within CPUs and memory, and high computing efficiency are achieved by employing the most advanced high-performance DRAM and high-speed memory network crossbar switch.