MOVIES

Munich, NEC High Performance Computing Europe GmbH (HPCE), founded this month, starts a new and very interesting offering, Try & Buy a NEC SX-6i. Some of those machines are reserved for scientists from academia, research and industry. They can test this desk side vector supercomputer, running jobs of their most innovative projects. The Programme starts in Germany and United Kingdom first. Scientists can use the machine in their lab three months for free. Based on their experience they can decide to buy, rent or give the machine back to NEC HPCE. Proposals of challenging and compute-intensive projects can be submitted to NEC until April 1st. NEC HPCE then chooses the most interesting projects. Researchers have to submit proposals of their innovative projects to NEC up to April 1st. As it is a new and innovative campaign, NEC HPCE has no experience of the interest. Actually this offer is limited to Germany and United Kingdom, but if it is a success, other countries will follow. NEC delivers the vector supercomputer SX-6i to the chosen scientist with the most interesting and challenging applications. The desk side NEC SX-6i has a peak performance of 8 GigaFlop/s (billion of floating point operations per second). Thus it compares with the CPU speed as the big multiprocessor systems in the big supercomputer centres. Examples are in Germany is the Climate Research Centre in Hamburg (DKRZ), in UK it is the British weather service, MetOffice in London. The operating system is NECs' own UNIX version SuperUX. The programs can be developed in Fortran and C++. Compared to the multi-million EURO costs of such big centres, the NEC SX-6i financially is in the range of labs and departments of companies. Thus it can be possible to acquire a supercomputer within their budget planning. As Jörg Stadler, Marketing Manager NEC HPCE, mentioned in a telephone discussion, these vector machines are not expensive as often other vendors say. An 8 GFlop/s, 8 GByte one processor office computer is including software in the range of 120 000 EURO. The list price of one node of an SX-6 with 8 CPUs, 64 GFlop/s and 64 GByte memory is about 2 million EURO. Jörg Stadler added:" With this Try & Buy offering we want to expand the application areas of the vector computer technology to other, smaller but challenging projects. With our offering the scientists can test and optimise their applications before there is a decision of a big investment. At the end of the three months test phase the machine can be bought with special conditions, can be used on a rental base, or can be returned to NEC". Conditions of the Proposals The system is installed with all the necessary system support for the project time of three months. NEC supports the scientist in the usage of the system. At the end the researcher has to write a report, discussing his project and the experiences gained. Application forms can be found in the Internet at: http://www.hpce.nec.com or caught at CeBIT on the NEC booth, hall 2, booth B.20. By Uwe Harms