NEC SX

NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop,[1][2] as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992-1993, and 2002-2004.[3] The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.

An SX-5 on display at the Australian Technology Park

History

The first models, the SX-1 and SX-2, were announced in April 1983, and released in 1985.[2][4][5][6] The SX-2 was the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop.[1][2] The SX-1 and SX-1E were less powerful models offered by NEC.

The SX-3 was announced in 1989,[7][8] and shipped in 1990.[6] The SX-3 allows parallel computing using both SIMD and MIMD.[9] It also switched from the ACOS-4 based SX-OS, to the AT&T System V UNIX-based SUPER-UX operating system.[6] In 1992 an improved variant, the SX-3R, was announced.[6] A SX-3/44 variant was the fastest computer in the world between 1992-1993 on the TOP500 list.

The SX-4 series was announced in 1994, and first shipped in 1995.[6] Since the SX-4, SX series supercomputers are constructed in a doubly parallel manner. A number of central processing units (CPUs) are arranged into a parallel vector processing node. These nodes are then installed in a regular SMP arrangement.

The SX-5 was announced and shipped in 1998,[6] with the SX-6 following in 2001, and the SX-7 in 2002.[10] Starting in 2001, Cray marketed the SX-5 and SX-6 exclusively in the US, and non-exclusively elsewhere for a short time.

The Earth Simulator, built from SX-6 nodes, was the fastest supercomputer from June 2002 to June 2004 on the LINPACK benchmark, achieving 35.86 TFLOPS.[3][11][12][13] As of 2020, 3 Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards can deliver comparable performance, at 14 TFLOPS per card. [14] The SX-9 was introduced in 2007 and discontinued in 2015. [15]

Tadashi Watanabe has been NEC's lead designer for the majority of SX supercomputer systems.[16] For this work he received the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 1998 and the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2006.

Hardware

Each system has multiple models, and the following table lists the most powerful variant of each system. Further certain systems have revisions, identified by a letter suffix.

Single node SX systems

System	Introduction	Max. CPUs	Peak CPU double precision GFLOPS	Peak system GFLOPS	Max. main memory	System memory B/W (GB/s)	Memory B/W per CPU (GB/s)
SX-1E[5][6][10]	1983	1		0.325[17]	128 MB
SX-1[5][10]	1983[6][10]	1		0.570[6] / 0.650[17]	256 MB
SX-2[5][10]	1983[6][10]	1	1.3[6]	1.3[10]	256 MB[6]	11	11
SX-3[7][8]	1990[10]	4[7][6]	5.5[8][10]	22[7][10]	2 GB[7]	44	22
SX-3R	1992
SX-4[10]	1994[18][10]	32	2	64	16 GB	512	16
SX-5[10]	1998[10][10]	16	8[10]	128	128 GB	1024	64
SX-6[10]	2001[10]	8	8[10]	64	64 GB	256	32
SX-6i	2001[10]	1			8 GB
SX-7[10]	2002[10]	32	8.83	282	256 GB	1129	35.3
SX-8[16][10]	2004[16][10]	8	16[10]	128	128 GB	512	64
SX-8i	2005				32 GB
SX-8R	2006	8	35.2	281.6	256 GB	563.2	70.4
SX-9[10]	2007	16	102.4[10]	1638	1 TB	4096	256
SX-ACE	2013	1	256	256	1 TB	256	256
SX-Aurora TSUBASA	2017	8	2450	19600	8×48GB	8×1200	1200

Multi-node SX systems

	SX-4	SX-4A	SX-5	SX-6	SX-8	SX-8R	SX-9	SX-ACE
Max. nodes	16	16	32	128	512	512	512	512
Max. CPUs	512	256	512	1,024	4,096	4,096	8,192	512
Peak TFLOPS	1	0.5	4	8	65	140.8	839	131
Max. main memory	256 GB	512 GB	4 TB	8 TB	64 TB	128 TB	512 TB	32 TB
Total memory B/W (TB/s)	8	4	32	32	131	281.6	2,048	131

Software environment

Operating system

Main article: SUPER-UX

The SX-1 and SX-2 ran the ACOS-4 based SX-OS. The SX-3 onwards run the SUPER-UX operating system (OS); the Earth Simulator runs a custom version of this OS.

Compilers

SUPER-UX comes with Fortran and C++ compilers. Cray has also developed an Ada compiler which is available as an option.

Software

Some vertical applications are available through NEC, but in general customers are expected to develop much of their own software. In addition to commercial applications, there is a wide body of free software for the UNIX environment which can be compiled and run on SUPER-UX, such as Emacs, and Vim. A port of GCC is also available for the platform.

SX-Aurora TSUBASA

The SX-Aurora TSUBASA PCIe card is running in a Linux machine, the Vector Host (VH), which provides operating system services to the Vector Engine (VE).[19] The VE operating system VEOS runs in user space on the VH. Applications compiled for the VE can use almost all Linux system calls, they are transparently forwarded and executed on the VH. The components of VEOS are licensed under the GNU General Public License.

References

1. Watanabe, Tadashi (1990). "Advanced Architecture and Technology of the NEC SX-3 Supercomputer". Supercomputing. 62. pp. 119–128. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-75771-6_8. ISBN 978-3-642-75773-0.
2. "NEC SX-1, SX-2". IPSJ Computer Museum. Information Processing Society of Japan. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
3. "The Earth Simulator: Earth Simulator Center | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites". www.top500.org. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
4. Uchida, Keiichiro; Itoh, Mikio (July 1985). "High speed vector processors in Japan". Computer Physics Communications. 37 (1–3): 7–13. Bibcode:1985CoPhC..37....7U. doi:10.1016/0010-4655(85)90131-6.
5. Watanabe, Tadashi (July 1987). "Architecture and performance of NEC supercomputer SX system". Parallel Computing. 5 (1–2): 247–255. doi:10.1016/0167-8191(87)90021-4.
6. Oyanagi, Yoshio (December 1999). "Development of supercomputers in Japan: Hardware and software". Parallel Computing. 25 (13–14): 1545–1567. doi:10.1016/S0167-8191(99)00084-8.
7. Watanabe, Tadashi (1993). "NEC SX-3 Supercomputer System". Supercomputers and Their Performance in Computational Fluid Dynamics. 37. pp. 63–75. doi:10.1007/978-3-322-87863-2_4. ISBN 978-3-528-07637-5.
8. Watanabe, T.; Matsumoto, H.; Tannenbaum, P. D. (1 August 1989). "Hardware technology and architecture of the NEC SX-3/SX-X supercomputer system". Proceedings of the 1989 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing. pp. 842–846. doi:10.1145/76263.1379809 (inactive 2020-01-22).
9. IWAYA, AKIHIRO; WATANABE, TADASHI (September 1991). "The Parallel Processing Feature of the NEC Sx-3 Supercomputer System". International Journal of High Speed Computing. 03 (3n04): 187–197. doi:10.1142/S0129053391000085.
10. NISHIKAWA, Takeshi (2008). "Supercomputer SX-9 Development Concept" (PDF). NEC Technical Journal. 3 (4). Retrieved 25 August 2018.
11. "Earth-Simulator - TOP500 Supercomputer Sites". www.top500.org. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
12. Habata, S; Yokokawa, M; Kitawaki, S (2003). "The earth simulator system" (PDF). NEC Research and Development. 44 (1): 21–26. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
13. Habata, Shinichi; Umezawa, Kazuhiko; Yokokawa, Mitsuo; Kitawaki, Shigemune (December 2004). "Hardware system of the Earth Simulator". Parallel Computing. 30 (12): 1287–1313. doi:10.1016/j.parco.2004.09.004.
14. https://www.techradar.com/amp/news/those-xbox-series-x-specs-dont-tell-us-much-do-they
15. https://jpn.nec.com/hpc/sx9/
16. Tagaya, Satoru; Nishida, Masato; Hagiwara, Takashi; Yanagawa, Takashi; Yokoya, Yuji; Takahara, Hiroshi; Stadler, Jörg; Galle, Martin; Bez, Wolfgang (2006). "The NEC SX-8 Vector Supercomputer System". High Performance Computing on Vector Systems. pp. 3–24. doi:10.1007/3-540-35074-8_1. ISBN 978-3-540-29124-4.
17. Dongarra, Jack J. (1988). The LINPACK Benchmark: An explanation. Supercomputing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 297. pp. 456–474. doi:10.1007/3-540-18991-2_27. ISBN 978-3-540-18991-6.
18. Hammond, S.W.; Loft, R.D.; Tannenbaum, P.D. (1996). "Architecture and Application: The Performance of the NEC SX-4 on the NCAR Benchmark Suite" (PDF). IEEE Conference Publication. doi:10.1109/SUPERC.1996.183527 (inactive 2020-01-22). Retrieved 25 August 2018.
19. "NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA - Vector Engine". www.nec.com. Retrieved 2018-03-14.

External links

• NEC GLobal HPC
• NEC Japan HPC
• NEC Aurora Web Forums

Records
Preceded by Fujitsu VP2600/10 4.0 gigaflops	World's most powerful supercomputer (NEC SX-3/44) 1992	Succeeded by Thinking Machines CM-5/1024 59.7 gigaflops