Newsgroups: comp.parallel From: John Snyder Subject: SX5.txt Organization: NEC - HNSX Supercomputers Date: 11 Jun 1998 11:01:39 GMT Message-ID: <6lodej$9r4$1@encore.ece.cmu.edu> NEC Announces the 4 TFLOPS SX-5 Series Supercomputer 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 . 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. SX-5 Series models announced include the full "A chassis" single node as follows: Processors 16 12 10 8 Peak GFLOPS 128 GFLOPS 96 GFLOPS 80 GFLOPS 64 GFLOPS Memory Capacity ----------- Up to 128 GB --------------- Memory Bandwidth 1 TB/s 768 GB/s 640 GB/s 512 GB/s I/O Bandwidth ----------- Up to 12.6 GB/s ------------ Announced half-sized "B chassis" single node models include: Processors 8 6 4 Peak GFLOPS 64 GFLOPS 48 GFLOPS 32 GFLOPS Memory Capacity ------- Up to 64 GB ---------- Memory Bandwidth 512 GB/s 384 GB/s 256 GB/s I/O Bandwidth ------- Up to 6.3 GB/s ------- Example Multi Node models incorporating the IXS Internode Crossbar Switch are: Processors 512 128 32 Nodes 32 8 2 Peak GFLOPS 4,096 GFLOPS 1,024 GFLOPS 256 GFLOPS Memory Capacity 4 TB 1 TB 256 GB Memory Bandwidth 32 TB/s 8 TB/s 2 TB/s I/O Bandwidth Up to 403.2 GB/s Up to 100.8 GB/s Up to 25.4 GB/s Bisection Bandwidth 256 GB/s 64 GB/s 16 GB/s For further information contact: In Asia: NEC Corporation Supercomputer Marketing Promotion Division 7-1 Shiba, 5-chome Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-01 Japan phone: +81-3-3798-9131 fax: +81-3-3798-9132 In Europe: NEC European Supercomputer Systems Operation Emanuel-Leutze-Strasse 4 Dusseldorf D40547, Germany phone: +49-211-5369-0 fax: +49-211-5369-199 In North America: HNSX Supercomputers Inc. 305 Foster Street Littleton, MA 01460 phone: +1-978-742-4690 fax: +1-978-742-4689 In Oceania: NEC Australia Pty. Ltd. High Performance Computing Systems Division 635 Ferntree Gulley Road Glen Waverley, Victoria 3150 Australia phone: +61-3-9262-1209 fax: +61-3-9262-1534 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MetaSuperComputing is a registered NEC trademark in Japan -- Articles to bigrigg+parallel@cs.cmu.edu (Admin: bigrigg@cs.cmu.edu) Archive: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/internet/usenet/comp.parallel