>think Cray's still pretty much
>"Rock the Casbah"
I would have to disagree with you, Cray's lucky to still exist (thank the
US government). Show me one that can even come close to this:
Littleton, MA, June 4, 1998: NEC Corporation today announced the 4
TeraFLOPS SX-5 Series supercomputer system. The SX-5 Series is a high end
product that complements the highly successful SX-4 Series. Even after 4
years in the market, the SX-4 Series continues to be recognized as the
pinnacle of high performance production systems and as a result, selected
SX-4 Series models will continue to be sold.
As with the SX-4 Series, the SX-5 Series distinguishes itself by offering
industrial quality large scale parallel processing through the
implementation of parallel nodes that are each complete SMP parallel vector
supercomputers.
Each individual SX-5 Series node can be configured to provide up to 128
GigaFLOPS of performance with 128 Gigabytes of shared main memory and 12.6
Gigabytes per second of I/O bandwidth. This level of performance, memory,
and I/O is unprecedented in the industry for any shared memory system.
SX-5 Series main memory is uniform access shared architecture. The shared
memory configuration is favored by applications developers because it
greatly simplifies programming as compared to explicit message passing
programming needed for distributed memory systems.
Bandwidth for a full node is 1 Terabytes per second. Sufficient independent
memory banks are incorporated to minimize interference from the sixteen 8
GigaFLOPS individual processors.
NEC's IXS Internode Crossbar Switch is used to interconnect up to 32 SX-5
Series systems to form a multi node configuration. The IXS provides global
addressing and extended inter-node instructions to result in a hybrid
shared-distributed memory single system image. Each SX-5 Series IXS
provides a bisection bandwidth of up to 256 Gigabytes per second with low
startup latencies.
SUPER-UX provides the UNIX based operating software environment. All of the
expected operating system enhancements are provided including very high
speed I/O, an NQS based batch subsystem, a special multi node job handling
class, Enhanced Resource Scheduling, and checkpoint-restart. SUPER-UX has
been in mission critical use worldwide since 1990 and has earned a
reputation for reliability, and for supporting efficient production
execution of high performance supercomputing-class applications.
SPINEware is offered on SUPER-UX to enable WebSuperComputing(1) . SPINEware
provides a single system look and feel metacomputing environment available
for all classes of UNIX based computational resource from personal
computers through SX-5 Series supercomputers.
The PSUITE Integrated Development Environment provides a unified window
system for code porting and development using Fortran90 and C compilers.
PSUITE integrates editing, compiling, execution, debugging, and performance
optimization for both vectorization and parallelization. OpenMP is
supported in the Fortran90 compiler to further promote the ease of shared
memory programming and portability of applications. Distributed programming
models are supported by an HPF compiler and MPI libraries.
PSUITE is available as a native product hosted directly on the SX-5 Series
system, or as a cross environment whereby most of the development effort
can be effectively offloaded to popular workstations.
SX-5 Series basic peripheral complement includes HIPPI-800 and FC-AL
technology RAID subsystems as well as high end SCSI devices such as RAID
disks and tape systems.
All commonly used high performance network options are available so that an
SX-5 Series system can be integrated into any environment.
There is a wide variety of high performance, optimized,
supercomputer-relevant applications already available for the SX-5 Series.
Although research and university codes are increasingly written for low
cost distributed memory platforms, most important third party applications
are targeted at shared memory SMP systems, such as the SX-4 Series and SX-5
Series.
NEC and collaborative independent applications vendors are continually
refining their respective applications by the introduction of advanced
numerical methods, and by the use of coding styles that are conducive to
obtaining the highest performance possible on the SX architecture.
The SX architecture enables outstanding high performance applications
because of the ease and efficiency of its shared memory environment. NEC
maintains applications specialist facilities in Japan, the United States,
and Europe to work closely with independent applications vendors to
continually improve computational methods and ensure the highest quality,
highest performance product is available for SX Series systems.
First customer shipment of SX-5 Series will be December 1998.
SX-4 Series A and BA models will continue to be sold for computational
requirements up to 32 GigaFLOPS.
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