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NEC SX-9 to be World's Fastest Vector Computer

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the better-faster-stronger dept.

An anonymous reader writes "NEC has announced the NEC SX-9 claiming it to be the fastest vector computer, with single core speeds of up to 102.4 GFLOPS and up to 1.6TFLOPS on a single node incorporating multiple CPUs. The machines can be used in complex large-scale computation, such as climates, aeronautics and space, environmental simulations, fluid dynamics, through the processing of array-handling with a single vector instruction. Yes, it runs a UNIX System V-compatible OS."

3 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. "up to" by Duncan3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only text that can ever follow the words "up to" in computing is "0.1 *". As in "speeds of up to 0.1 * 102.4 GFLOPS". Every time a marketing droid published a press release, a kitten dies.

    --
    - Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
  2. Re:Quite possibly. by SamP2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    CAN run Linux and RUNS Linux are not quite the same thing.

    To put things in perspective, 99% of PCs in the world CAN run Linux. :-)

  3. Re:Quite possibly. by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This was certainly the case when I used vector processors. It is possible that the vector processor does not run an OS at all. It has been many years since I have worked on such a beast but when I did we ran a loader system with a standard OS which would cross compile code for the processor and load it almost onto the hardware (there was actually a small program we called a monitor to deal with I/O, etc, but no multi-tasking, security or anything). It would then run and the results were read back into the front-end computer.