NEC Strikes Back With SX-8 Supercomputer

News for nerds writes "It was just 3 weeks ago that we learned IBM's BlueGene/L with 36.01 TFlops edged out NEC's Earth Simulator, but today NEC announces a new SX-8 supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65 TFlops (press release). It may be available in the U.S. as Cray's OEM like SX-6."

Comments

Shallow Minds

[stecoop]

65 trillion calculations per second and all I ponder is if NEC would mind using my user id while running seti@home.

Yes, but...

[extagboy]

...can it figure out the question to the answer 42?

It's like

[Moby Cock]

This is like an arms race of yesteryear. The Germans and the Brits with their battleships, the Americans and Soviets with there nukes, the Yankees and Red Sox with payroll. Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.

Re:It's like

[Timesprout]

Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.

Yes because this sort of computing power holds no attraction to the military for weapon modeling purposes or to the untouchables running echelon type programs.

Damn....

[identity0]

Note that 'SX-8' pronounced 'Sex-ay' :-)

65 TFlop is only an estimate

[foobar3149]

The 65 TFlop for the SX-8 is only an estimate while the 36 TFlop for BlueGene/L was real performance. So it is not certain that SX-8 will be faster than Blue Gene/L

Re:65 TFlop is only an estimate

[Troy Baer]

You're trying to say they could have overestimated the performance by almost 100%?

No, the original poster was saying that the 65TF number from NEC is theoretical peak performance based on the maximum possible number of FP operations per clock cycle (which can never happen in real code, due to pesky little things like having to access memory), while the ~35TF number for the Blue Gene/L prototype is measured performance on an actual piece of code called the Parallel Linpack benchmark. It's not unusual for systems to perform as low as 50% of peak on Parallel Linpack, although 70-90% is more typical on systems with decent memory bandwidth (which the SX8 presumably has).

(Note that I'm deliberately sidestepping the debate over whether Parallel Linpack bears any resemblence to reality.)

Re:65 TFlop is only an estimate

[flaming-opus]

It's probably a pretty good estimate, as this is just a clock speed bump and packaging update to the sx-6 (earth simulator).

An equally important criticism is that they've only announced the POSSIBILITY of building a 65TF system. No one has actually ordered one. The cray X1 can scale up to 50TF if fully populated. The X1E scales up to 150TF. This is of no great consequence, as the largest one in production is only 10TF. Yes they could build a really big sx-8, but it cost $200M to build the earth simulator, probably something similar to build this thing.

There are a lot of computers that are really cool - on paper.

Re:Runs Linux?

[mukund]

In reply to my own post..

The Cray SX-6 System runs the UNIX-based SUPER-UX operating system.

Sorry about that. Maybe they ported GFS.. dunno.

BGL will be back on top in short order

[tubbtubb]

Remember that the 36.01 TF figure for BlueGene/L was only using 8 racks.
The final BG/L will use 64 Racks.
Also, the SX-8 figure is only an estimation.

Re:What about cost?

[tokenhillbilly]

Actually, the computer price is quite reasonable. It's the nuclear power plant to supply the 21 million jigawatts required to run it and its cooling system that will set you back big bucks.

Re:Real-world applications?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

At a rental of only $17,000/month, it's far more affordable than a Cray for small quick projects.

Re:Make your time

[Gil-galad55]

The SX-8 has no chance to survive.

NEC, make your time.

But..

[SnarfQuest]

How well does it handle XP SP2?