Is the vector supercomputer dead? Certainly not if one can judge by NEC’s new SX-ACE, successor to the valiant SX-9, which increases computing power by a factor of 10 and reduces floor surface by 5. The machine features a proprietary vector SoC containing four 64 GB bandwidth vector cores delivering up to 64 Gflops each, which makes them simply the best-performing cores in the world! On the form-factor front, an SX-ACE cabinet can house up to 64 modules each containing one quad-core processor, for a total of 16 Tflops per cabinet. It is possible to interconnect up to eight, the maximum peak performance then reaching 131 Tflops. If, from a technical standpoint, SX-ACE represents a certain state of the art in massive parallelization, NEC now has to convince customers to exit the familiar x86 universe and adopt “new” programming methods using NEC compilers and libraries…

NEC’s new SX-ACE vector supercomputer.