NEC discloses usage of the SX vector computer series and its efficiency

Wolfsburg 09 Mar 00 NEC is strong in the automotive industry. In Germany for example a NEC SX-5 complex with 12 processors is used by Volkswagen AG. DaimlerChrysler and Porsche access the machines of HWW in Stuttgart, there are two 16 processor SX-5 and additional SX-4s installed. In Europa NEC has sold 58 systems, 16 SX-5, 35 SX-4, 6 SX-3 and one SX1/2. This was revealed by Dr. Christian Lantwin at a press meeting at Volkswagen AG in Wolfsburg, where he presented the role of NEC and the situation in the vectorprocessing arena, the technological changes, some figures of the NEC SX-5, the application areas and compared the machine with RISC processors on the base of real life programs.

A major step for NEC being competitive in high-performance computing, was the change in technology - moving from ECL to CMOS. The gains are dramatic, a cost reduction of a factor of 10, extremely less power consumption and less floor space. This was realised when transferring from SX-3 to SX-4 series. The new NEC SX-5 is available in different versions, a high-end system with 8 GFlop/s peak performance and as a multinode computer with up to 512 CPUs - 4 TFlop/s peak. The other model is well suited for industrial applications. It has a lower peak performance of 4 GFlop/s. Even this can be clustered as a multi node system with 512 CPUs and 2 TFlop/s peak performance. Both types are well balanced systems. Some technical figures underline this fact, per GFlop/s a memory bandwidth of 8 GB/s is available. A 16 CPU machine with its 128 GB memory has a memory bandwidth of 1 TeraByte/s and uses a crossbar switch.

Lantwin mentioned an other issue, the efficiency of the vector machine compared to RISC processors. NEC collected a lot of application programs from different application areas. The efficiency was measured:

 SX4/5			nr. of programs		efficiency Application Area Climate/Weather		39			25.7% CFD				28			36.6% Chemistry			26			37%

CFD = Computational Fluid Dynamics. The results show that vectors have an efficiency between 26 and 37%. This means a user gets out of a 2 GFlop/s SX-4 GFlop/s in the range of .52 to .74 GFlop/s. In specific cases with a good vectorised program, the Swiss Supercomputercenter CSCS/SCSC in Manno measured much higer percentage, sometimes more than 90%.

Then Christian Lantwin compared the NEC SX-5 application performance with a typical RISC machine:

 			Vector			RISC 			8 GF			1 GF efficiency 		30%			10% then this compares to	1 CPU			24 CPUs computer		16 CPU-node		384 RISC-CPUs

This means, for well vectorised programs, a vector machine has major advantages compared to a RISC. For example, instead of a 16 CPU node of an SX-5 the user has to install nearly 400 RISC CPUs, which have to be managed.

Lantwin additionally listed the percentage of NEC vector installations in different application areas:

 automotive                                                                 27% Computer Center University/Research                         32% Aerospace					25% Seismic					 8% Climate/Weather				 8%

NEC is strong in the automotive industry. In Germany for example a NEC SX-5 complex with 12 processors is used by Volkswagen AG. DaimlerChrysler and Porsche access the machines of HWW in Stuttgart, there are two 16 processor SX-5 and additional SX-4s installed. In Europa NEC has sold 58 systems, 16 SX-5, 35 SX-4, 6 SX-3 and one SX1/2.

In the meantime not only the "big" companies use vector supercomputers - because of the reduced costs. Lantwin presented an example of a small and medium enterprise (SME) in the automotive environment. An SME, the engineering enterprise Tecosim in Ruesselsheim, is specialised in technical computations like crash, CFD, static and dynamics computations for the German automotive industry. Since beginning 1999 they cooperate with the Cologne based service provider RLE international. In both locations about 50 engineers and physicists are working. Tecosim uses an own NEC SX-4 supercomputer and plans to extend it in the future.

NEC is also involved in the Earth Simulator www.gaia.jaeri.go.jp ), a Japanese research project.

Uwe Harms

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