NEC SX-9 supercomputer is world's fastest at 839 TFLOPS

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 SX-9 features the first CPU capable of a peak vector performance of 102.4 GFLOPS (one billion floating point operations per second) per single core. In addition to the newly developed CPU, the SX-9 combines large-scale shared memory of up to 1TB and ultra high-speed interconnects achieving speeds up to 128GB/second.

If the performance of the SX-9 is sustained during “official” benchmarking, it will topple Blue Gene/L from the top of the list. Three years ago the NEC-built Earth Simulator was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer but that machine was surpassed by an IBM computer and since has dropped to 20th position in the current Top 500 list. SX-9 achieves a theoretical maximum peak performance of 839 TFLOPS. That's more than double what IBM BlueGene/L machine at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory currently has.

With the new supercomputer NEC will again be challenging large U.S. computer makers like IBM Corp. and Cray Inc.

The machine will be built in Kobe in western Japan and operated by public research institute Riken. It will be mixed architecture with NEC and Hitachi designing the vector side and Fujitsu the scalar side. A budget of about ¥115 billion (US$1 billion) has been earmarked for the project.

The SX-9 is about 13 times as fast as its predecessor, the SX-8, and consumes less energy than comparable models, according to Tokyo-based NEC.