INDUSTRY

NEW YORK, NY—NEC Corporation (Nasdaq: NIPNY) announced receipt of an order for a state-of-the-art vector supercomputer system from German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ: Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH), Germany. The system to be installed is an SX-6/192M24 (maximum vector performance: 1.5TFLOPS - 1.5 trillion floating point operations per second, main memory capacity: 1.5TByte). This is going to be the largest dedicated system utilized for earth system research in Europe, and also the largest among NEC’s vector supercomputers “SX- Series” utilized world-wide. First installed as SX-6/64M8 in February 2002, the system is going to be expanded in stages: SX-6/128M16 in August 2002, then SX-6/192M24 in March 2003. Established in 1987 under the support of the Federal Minister for Research and Technology (BMBF), DKRZ mainly provides state of the art high performance computing, data handling and visualization facilities for the German earth system research community. The compute server is utilized for climate simulation on a global and regional scale and for research in climate change. The data and visualization servers are used for the analysis of the data generated in the simulation runs. DKRZ has a project to create and operate a national climate data base system, which is also hosted on the data server provided by NEC. Since a large amount of processing is required in the fields such as numerical climate simulations and model analysis on a global scale, a parallel vector supercomputer that is capable of ultra-high-speed processing performance and large memory capacity is essential. The new system meets these strong needs. NEC released and started sales of the “SX-6 Series,” the highest vector performance of which is 8 Teraflop/s (in case of SX-6/1024M128, TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second). This world-fastest technical vector supercomputer is available in the US, Canada and Mexico through Cray Inc., NEC’s exclusive distributor in the North American market. Vector computation machines have high data transfer rate between CPU and memory in proportion to its CPU performance. The SX-6 Series achieves the shortened access time and high efficiency of computations by realizing high throughput performance. This was realized by employing state-of-the-art high performance DRAM and high-speed memory network cross bar switch. It also contributes to the improved price performance and much smaller footprint by using high-density CMOS LSI technology employing 0.15-micron design rule. NEC takes this large-scale order as a milestone and intends to expand its vector supercomputers in research institutions related to earth system research fields. For further information visit www.nec.com