NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced that the NEC Deutschland GmbH was awarded to provide an LX-series supercomputer, a state of the art high-performance-computing system to the VSC at KU Leuven, Belgium. When operational this system will be the fastest Flemish supercomputer (Tier-1), and it will be ranked amongst the top 150 biggest and fastest supercomputers in the world. The infrastructure will cost 5,5 million Euro and it is financed by the Flemish minister for Science and Innovation in Belgium.

Intensive computations for advanced research
The new supercomputer in Leuven will support research in areas such as renewable energy sources, development of new materials or new medicines. The computer will enable researchers to compute more detailed climate models or research climate on other planets.

For fundamental research, which is important on a medium term, the new system will also open new horizons. The new Tier 1 supercomputer represents an investment of 5.5 million NEC was selected through a public tender to supply and install the machine. The funding of the project is supported by the Hercules Foundation of the Flemish government under the authority of the Flemish minister of Science and Innovation Philippe Muyters. The Supercomputer has been designed and will be operated by the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC), a partnership of the five Flemish university associations.

One of the 150 fastest computers in the world
The supercomputer will have a compute power of more than 623 TFlop/s, that is the equivalent of 2000 fast PC’s. This is three times the capacity of the first Flemish supercomputer, which is installed in Gent and is now about 4 years old. The supercomputer will utilize the newest generation of Intel processors E-2600v4, and also the memory 2400MHz, Mellanox EDR network interconnect and NEC GxFS storage capacity are state of the art and capable to tackle the complex problems of the scientific users. The new machine will be installed mid-2016 at VSC KU Leuven and will be one of the 150 fastest listed supercomputers in the world.

Leading edge technology

• 623 Tflops peak performance
• 580 Nodes Intel E5-2680v4
• Mellanox EDR 2:1
• 634 TB NEC GxFS file system
• Watercooled racks for best optimized TCO
• 20GB/s aggregated peak performance and +24 000 IOPS
• NEC LXC3 cluster solution, NEC Docker, NEC IBViz monitirong tool.

“It is an honour for NEC to provide a new supercomputer for the research and engineering at the VSC KU Leuven. NEC’s basic strategy in the high-performance-computing business is to focus on the users and their needs, aiming to achieve high sustained performance on real user codes to get the scientific results. Sustained performance is a key factor for NEC” said Bruno Lecointe, Senior Sales Manager western Europe, NEC Deutschland GmbH. “NEC wants to be a partner of science, not a hardware vendor. NEC is trying on closely cooperate with scientific users to understand the challenges they are facing and to address those challenges by our product.”

“The Flemish Government is committed to investing in research and innovation. Our research institutions are among the best in the world. We can only maintain and strengthen that top position if we keep investing.” said the Flemish minister of Science and Innovation Philippe Muyters. “We were not only interested in buying a new start-of-the art hardware system, but also to offer to the Flemish research community a global solution that includes high quality software, training and consultancy services” said Ingrid Barcena Roig Tier 1 project leader at KU Leuven. “We are looking forward to start our collaboration with NEC.

NEC has a large experience in building and managing high performance systems and we believe that their HPC expertise will help us to provide to our users an excellent machine that will boost their research to higher levels”

Source: NEC