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

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."

Comments

Quite possibly.

[jd]

The architecture (a vector processor) is not in the vanilla kernel, but the kernel is fairly parallel, thread-safe and SMP-safe, so I really can't see any reason why you couldn't put Linux on such a platform. Because a lot of standard parallel software these days assumes a cluster of discrete nodes with shared resources, they'd be best borrowing code from Xen and possibly MOSIX to simulate a common structure.

(This would waste some of the compute power, but if the total time saved from not changing the application exceeds the time that could be saved using more of the cycles available, you win. It is this problem of creating illusions of whatever architecture happens to be application-friendly at a given time that has made much of my work in parallel architectures - such as the one produced by Lightfleet - so interesting... and so subject to office politics.)