NEC SX-6

The SX-6 is a supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to eight vector processors, which share up to 64 GB of computer memory. The SX-6 processor is a single chip implementation containing a vector processor unit and a scalar processor fabricated in a 0.15 μm CMOS process with copper interconnects, whereas the SX-5 was a multi-chip implementation.

The vector processor is made up of eight vector pipeline units each with seventy-two 256-word vector registers. The vector unit performs add/shift, multiply, divide and logical operations. The scalar unit is 64 bits wide and contains a 64 KB cache. The scalar unit can decode, issue and complete four instructions per clock cycle. Branch prediction and speculative execution is supported. A multi-node system is configured by interconnecting up to 128 single-node systems via a high-speed, low-latency IXS (Internode Crossbar Switch).

The peak performance of the SX-6 series vector processors is 8 GFLOPS. Thus a single-node system provides a peak performance of 64 GFLOPS, while a multi-node system provides up to 8 TFLOPS of peak floating-point performance.

The SX-6 uses SUPER-UX, a Unix-like operating system developed by NEC. A SAN-based global file system (NEC's GFS) is available for a multinode installation. The default batch processing system is NQSII, but open source batch systems such as Sun Grid Engine are also supported.

See also

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 2/15/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.