NEC SX Aurora TSUBASA

Vector Engine (VE) is developed by NEC for the purpose to fast-tracked computing using vectorization, on an idea that full application runs on the high-performance Vector Engine and the Vector Host (VH) will take care of the operating system tasks, that is a standard x86 server. NEC has presented for the first time its SX series vector processor which is integrated transparently into the Linux software environment. This permits the Vector Engine to concentrate on best application performance providence.

The successful evolution building of the SX-series of vector-supercomputers the next generation of the following product line precisely focusses on complete aspects of efficiency, NEC have presented the combination of the cluster flexibility with the NEC Vector Engine Processor raw power. Earlier SX series was only available for the large corporations or compute centers but not its availability spread all over the world engineers and HPC enthusiasts.

Vectorization is the three-degree concept with maximum memory bandwidth and few but strong cores, strong foundation for the high sustained performance is given feature by the new NEC vector architecture.

Eight vector-cores is integrated by the Vector Engine Processor and 48 GB of high bandwidth memory (HBM2) providing a peak performance of up to 2.45 TeraFLOPS. The computational efficiency is achieved by the unrivaled memory bandwidth of up to 1.2 TB/s per CPU and by the latency-hiding effect of the vector architecture.

The single Vector Engine Processor core arithmetic unit can execute 32 double precision floating point operations per cycle with its vector registers holding 256 floating point values. With 3 fused-multiply-add units (FMA) each core has a peak performance of 192 FLOP per cycle or up to 307.2 GigaFLOPS (double precision). The Vector Engine has a peak performance of up to 2.45 TeraFLOPS.

 

The new NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA platform facilitates the complete hardware range from workstation for the engineering office up to state-of-the-art computer platform for renowned research institutes. This is a strong platform for the software developers that scaling up to large system. Small hardware installation is provided by the allowance of the research institution where research groups can test and evaluate their own code without having to use time on a large production installation.

NEC have five different hardware platforms of varying performance, enabling the customers to select a solution that best meets their requirements.

 

The continuation of the NEC SX Vector Architecture

The SX-Aurora TSUBASA is designed to deliver outstanding computational efficiency and consequently high sustained performance.
NEC has combined the versatility of the normal x86 CPU and the performance of a Vector Engine Processor, in that the application runs on the Vector Engine while tasks like I/O and similar operating system functions get performed by the x86 CPU, taking advantage of the integration, the Linux kernel has with a wide variety of hardware and software systems. The application developer concentrates on getting the most out of the Vector Engine and large high-speed memory. The full application runs on the vector Engine so you don’t need to accelerate the parts on the number of cards. Moreover, a single core I so powerful to run weak scaling application which profits from vectorization show a better performance on the NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA platform than on other platforms.

SX-Aurora TSUBASA provides the real value to the engineers and scientist by combining the excellent usability and performance. The design also reduced the requirement of the low floor spacing and low power consumption.

[PDF] SX-Aurora_e