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

Re:Oh?

[Anonymous Coward]

so awesome when girls post...

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.)

Re:Quite possibly.

[SamP2]

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. :-)

Re:Quite possibly.

[Calinous]

The cost of the supercomputers is so high, that sometimes several man-month of tailoring the software to run as efficient as possible on the hardware could be recovered during a couple of days of processing.
      For the kind of computation the supercomputer market requests, a 5% improvement in running speed on a supercomputer can worth millions

Re:Quite possibly.

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:Quite possibly.

[bockelboy]

That's the current, popular, Blue Gene/L architecture. The Blue Genes are composed of densely packed boards, each of which has a PowerPC chip and many vector processors. The PowerPC chips run a Linux-like OS and do some normal-looking I/O (filesystems, networking, etc), while the vector processors churn lots of data and have simplistic I/O.

That GP who suggests that Xen is used to distribute tasks obviously isn't familiar with the needs of big iron.

I can see the ads now

[UnixUnix]

"Easter Island's Weather Forecasting Service believes operation of the NEC SX-9 would realize a 53% savings under Windows Server 2008 compared to under UNIX"

Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS?

[thedarknite]

What's with these new fangled measurements.

I'd like to know what it is in Libraries of Congress per Jiffy

Does it play vector games?

[filesiteguy]

I wonder how well it will do with the really cool vector games like Asteroids or BattleZone or Tempest or...

...Star Wars! Yeah, we could take this little baby, setup a sit-down booth, add some speakers and we'd be set!

"what's your vector, Victor?"

Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS?

[PresidentEnder]

Your units don't cancel properly. Flops = floating point operations / second, PS3s / foot-second = physical object / (viscosity / weight). You could stretch PS3s to be units of processing power / time, which gives you processing power / time / viscosity, which we'll fudge to be about flops / viscosity.

I dunno: maybe this thing could run faster at higher temperatures in lower gravity?

(/pretending to know what I'm talking about)

Re:1.6 Teraflops?

[RuBLed]

Ahh... so you're planning to turn Aero on.

Re:Logical question:

[deniable]

Well, distributed is often seen as poor-mans parallel, but in this case they don't compare. Vector units have large arrays of data and perform the same operation on all of them at once. Think array or matrix operations being done in one step rather than needing loops. This is where a SIMD architecture takes off.

The only unit I ever got to play with had a 64x32 grid of processors, you could add a row of numbers in log2(n) steps instead on n. It was cool because you could tell each processor to grab a value from the guy next to him (or n steps in a given direction from him) and so on. You could calculate dot products of matrices very quickly.

The distributed stuff you mentioned is mostly farming. Take a big loop of independent steps, break them up and pass them out to a (possibly) heterogeneous collection of processing nodes. Collect the answers when they finish. Render farms work the same way. It's a good way to break up some problems, but it's not what a vector unit does.

Now, I haven't touched this stuff for eleven years so my facts are possibly wrong. I'm sure someone will be along to correct me.

"up to"

[Duncan3]

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.

Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS?

[sqrt(2)]

Your units don't cancel properly... Oh no, physics class flashback! No! NOOOOOOOO! I don't want to do this whole equation again!

Re:Oh?

[colourmyeyes]

user@host:~ $ ls
You are about to list the files in this directory.
Are you sure you want to do this? [y/n] y

Enter Administrator password:

We're sorry, using MS Bash 4.00 Basic you do not have
the proper privilege level to view system files.
Please purchase MS Bash 4.00 Mega, Ultra, or Extreme.
Would you like to purchase one of these products now? [y/n] y

We're sorry, this product is not upgradeable. Please
reinstall your operating system, choosing "clean install"
during the upgrade process. Thank you for choosing the
rich user experience provided by MS Bash 4.00.

MS Bash must now restart your computer.

Link to more information

[Tom Womack]

http://www.nec.de/hpc/hardware/sx-series/index.html

There are four PDFs there; the brochure is a four-colour glossy, but there is some real information. Sadly, the interesting-looking white papers are for the SX6, two generations earlier.

SX9 summary: 65nm technology, 3.2GHz clock speed, eight vector elements handled per cycle with two multiply and two add units, which is where the 102.4Gflop/CPU figure comes from. 16 CPUs in a box about the size of a standard 42U rack.

Totally absurdly fast (ten 64-bit words per cycle per CPU) access to a large (options are 512GB or 1TB) shared main memory; absurdly fast (128GB/second) inter-node bandwidth.

Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS?

[Fred_A]

Funnily enough - this isn't totally irrelevant.

In 2000, IBM, Toshiba and Sony collaborated to create a Cell processor, consisting of one scalar processor and eight vector processors, for the Sony PlayStation 3. - Wikipedia.org So there should be a Tera-PlayStation (TPS) measurement ? And if so who has the TPS report on that machine ?