NEC updates vector supercomputer

NEC on Wednesday announced a new high-performance computer system, the SX-8, the latest incarnation of the high-end but relatively rare "vector" computer breed.

Most systems in the high-performance computing market are "scalar" machines that process information bit by bit, but NEC and rival Cray continue to sell vector machines that can process data and fetch information from memory in large chunks.

Vector systems are well-suited to mathematical tasks that crop up often in scientific and technical calculations. A collection of vector systems hooked together to work in parallel is the foundation of the Earth Simulator, an NEC machine that since 2002 has topped a list of the 500 fastest computers.

Starting in December, customers will be able to rent the SX-8 from NEC for a monthly price of $10,882 (1.17 million yen), the company said. A system with one processor costs about $460,000, while an eight-processor model costs about $1.2 million.

The company has a goal to sell more than 700 of the systems in the next three years--the same number of SX-brand systems that NEC has sold since it launched the SX-2 in 1983.

Vector systems once were more common among supercomputing customers, but nowadays among high-performance systems they're being overshadowed by scalar machines. Hewlett-Packard leads the market, with IBM in second place and gaining. Increasingly, customers are selecting clusters of low-end servers networked together, rather than single, standalone machines.

The SX-8 can be purchased as a single-node system with eight processors; as many as 512 nodes can be grouped together in a collection with 64 terabytes of memory, performing 65 trillion calculations per second, NEC said.

The posting of advertisements, profanity, or personal attacks is prohibited. Click here to review our Terms of Use.