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…
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