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. It had LSI integrated circuits with 20,000 gates per IC with a per-gate delay time of 70 picoseconds, could house 4 arithmetic processors with up to 4 sharing the same main memory, and up to several processors to achieve up to 22 GFLOPS of performance, with 1.37 GFLOPS of performance with a single processor. 100 LSI ICs were housed in a single multi chip module to achieve 2 million gates per module. The modules were watercooled.[10]

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.[11] 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][12][13][14] As of 2020, 3 Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards can deliver comparable performance, at 14 TFLOPS per card. [15] The SX-9 was introduced in 2007 and discontinued in 2015. [16]

Tadashi Watanabe has been NEC's lead designer for the majority of SX supercomputer systems.[17] 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
SystemIntroductionMax. CPUsPeak CPU double precision GFLOPSPeak system GFLOPSMax. main memorySystem memory B/W (GB/s)Memory B/W per CPU (GB/s)
SX-1E[5][6][11]198310.325[18]128 MB
SX-1[5][11]1983[6][11]10.570[6] / 0.650[18]256 MB
SX-2[5][11]1983[6][11]11.3[6]1.3[11]256 MB[6]1111
SX-3[7][8]1990[11]4[7][6]5.5[8][11]22[7][11]2 GB[7]4422
SX-3R1992
SX-4[11]1994[19][11]3226416 GB51216
SX-5[11]1998[11]168[11]128128 GB102464
SX-6[11]2001[11]88[11]6464 GB25632
SX-6i2001[11]18 GB
SX-7[11]2002[11]328.83282256 GB112935.3
SX-8[17][11]2004[17][11]816[11]128128 GB51264
SX-8i200532 GB
SX-8R2006835.2281.6256 GB563.270.4
SX-9[11]200716102.4[11]16381 TB4096256
SX-ACE201312562561 TB256256
SX-Aurora TSUBASA201782450196008×48GB8×12001200
Multi-node SX systems
SX-4SX-4ASX-5SX-6SX-8SX-8RSX-9SX-ACE
Max. nodes 161632128512512512512
Max. CPUs 5122565121,0244,0964,0968,192512
Peak TFLOPS 10.54865140.8839131
Max. main memory 256 GB512 GB4 TB8 TB64 TB128 TB512 TB32 TB
Total memory B/W (TB/s) 843232131281.62,048131

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).[20] 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 2021-01-10).CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2021 (link)
  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. http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/super/0011.html
  11. NISHIKAWA, Takeshi (2008). "Supercomputer SX-9 Development Concept" (PDF). NEC Technical Journal. 3 (4). Retrieved 25 August 2018.
  12. "Earth-Simulator - TOP500 Supercomputer Sites". www.top500.org. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
  13. Habata, S; Yokokawa, M; Kitawaki, S (2003). "The earth simulator system" (PDF). NEC Research and Development. 44 (1): 21–26. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
  14. 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.
  15. https://www.techradar.com/amp/news/those-xbox-series-x-specs-dont-tell-us-much-do-they
  16. https://jpn.nec.com/hpc/sx9/
  17. 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.
  18. 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. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  19. 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 2021-01-10). Retrieved 25 August 2018.CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2021 (link)
  20. "NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA - Vector Engine". www.nec.com. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
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
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