Research & Academic

Universities traditionally are at the frontline of supercomputing. They have always had a need for compute power for research and education.

According to the TOP500 list (as of June 2026) Research (142 systems representing 28.4%) and Academic (131 systems representing 26.2%) provide a total of 64.6% of all systems on the list. From the current list the top 10 are all form research or academic.

The five EFlops supercomputer have been built for laboratories or reaserch. So as it goes for supercomputing the most powerful machines are built for the academic and research arena.

However many of the industrial companies do not run or do not publish their LINPACK benchmark results so the list should not be seen as absolute.

NAOJ - National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

RWTH Aachen

RWTH Aachen University (in German Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen – RWTH) is a public Research University located in Aachen, in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany.

With more than 44,300 students enrolled in 144 study programs, is one of the leading universities of science and technology. RWTH Aachen has repeatedly been part of the federal and state excellence initiative from 2007 until now. RWTH Aachen is a founding member of the CESAER association of universities of science and technology in Europe, and IDEA League, a strategic alliance of five leading universities of technology in Europe.

Cologne University

Osaka University

The University of Osaka, besides other fields, does research in laser nuclear fusion, laser processing and high energy density science (HED). This is largely done by using laser light, electron, ion and neutron beams. In this process it is very important to run computational simulations of radiation hydrodynamics.

Newly developed numerical models typically have to be fully developed and tuned before they can be ported to the supercomputer. This is where the biggest advantage of the SX-Aurora TSUBASA tower model comes into play. The compact size of the machine allows it to be placed near the scientist's desk inside the laboratory. The code then can be tuned with less effort and transferred over to the supercomputer more easily.

The performance of the radiation hydrodynamics code is depends on the memory bandwidth, where the SX-Aurora TSUBASA provides market-leading advantage.

This allows a real-time simulation for data assimilation with respect to both the laser experimental data and the simulation data. This saves the university a lot of work and time they have to invest in code tuning and porting.

Waseda University

The Waseda Univeristy – Green Computing System Research and Development Center was founded to develop ultra-low power, high performance computers.

The university sees the SX-Aurora TSUBASA as a very promising technology for this given purpose. The objective is to use the SX-Aurora TSUBASA vector engine to speed up various applications and simultaneously reduce power consumption. This can be achieved by focusing on the research of Automatic Parallelizing Compilers.

As a result of a joint research the Waseda University was able to speed up a NAS Parallel Benchmark with CG program automatic parallelization and automatic vectorization on one single SX-Aurora TSUBASA core by a factor of 11 (from ~115sec to ~10sec). This was achieved by using the universities' own OSCAR compiler on a NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA A101-1 tower model.

Tokyo University of Science

The Department of Information and Computer Technology at Tokyo University of Science specializes in Computational Fluid Dynamics. Dr. Eng Kozo Fujii has been doing research in the field of Aerospace applications for more than 40 years with the help of supercomputers. With large-scale simulations for complicated flow fields over an aircraft or estimations of rocket plume acoustics the reliability of payload satellites could be calculated.

Real-time simulations or transaction-type use of supercomputers will be needed in the near future as supercomputers will merge into our social life as they work behind the scene of our daily activities. NEC’s SX-Aurora TSUBASA is well-tailored for such a purpose as it allows it to try large-scale simulations right away without porting the code.

Tohoku University

Tohoku University’s Cyberscience Center has installed an inter-university joint-usage institute with state-of-the-art supercomputers. Besides other research fields Tohoku University is engaged in real-time simulations of heatstroke as well as in the development of a Tsunami inundation prediction system. As supercomputers are growing in efficiency and computing power, which in turn is becoming more easily accessible, it will become easier to contribute to predictions like these to ensure a safer and healthier society.

Supercomputers recently focus on higher peak performance, the NEC vector architecture give priority to both capabilities of arithmetic processing and data transfer. This is expected to lead to a well-balanced design regarding computing and data transfer.