NEC Delivers SX-ACE Vector Supercomputers for use as the Earth Simulator

*** For immediate use May 26, 2015


Tokyo, May 26, 2015 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced the delivery of a large-scale system using SX-ACE vector supercomputers to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). JAMSTEC will begin operating the system as the Earth Simulator on June 1 this year.

Consisting of 5,120 nodes of SX-ACE, the Earth Simulator is a large-scale system with a maximum theoretical performance of 1,310 teraFLOPS (TFLOPS). This upgrade enables the system to carry out high-speed processing of more complex and larger scale simulations that were difficult to perform on the previous system. Moreover, the system is expected to contribute to solving global environmental issues, revealing the mechanisms of crustal movement and earthquake occurrences, and predicting and taking countermeasures against natural disasters.

The SX-ACE is a new vector supercomputer equipped with a multi-core vector CPU, enabling the world's top-level single-core performance of 64 gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) and the largest memory bandwidth per core of 64 gigabytes per second (GB/s). Its performance per rack has improved 10-fold over the previous model, with a rack computing performance of 16 TFLOPS and a memory bandwidth of 16 terabytes per second (TB/s). It is especially suited for scientific and engineering computing applications and data-intensive applications that require high-speed processing of big data. It achieves high sustained performance across a range of simulations: weather forecasting, analysis of global environmental changes, fluid-dynamics analysis, nanotechnology, development of new materials, and many others.

Using NEC's leading edge LSI technology, a high-density packaging design, and high-efficiency cooling technology, the SX-ACE also reduces power consumption by 90% (*) and requires 20% of the floor space (*) of the existing model.

The Earth Simulator is used to make detailed assessments of the impact of global warming, predict future climate changes, reproduce and predict severe weather phenomena such as typhoons and torrential rains, reveal the mechanisms of earthquake occurrences, predict tsunami flooding over a wide area and with high resolution, and reveal the process by which planetary magnetic fields are generated. It is expected to accelerate research in marine-earth science with a wealth of computational resources.



Commenting on the delivery of the Earth Simulator, Kimihiko Fukuda, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation said, "By providing SX-ACE, NEC will contribute to research and development in the field of marine-earth science. We will continue to use our vector technologies to promote the development of next-generation, high-performance servers for industrial applications and as a utilization base in the area of big data, in addition to the existing areas of application of supercomputers. In doing so, we will contribute to the development of leading-edge technologies."