New NEC Vector Supercomputer for debis Systemhaus Solutions for Research GmbHBrunswick 13 December 2000 Debis Systemhaus Solutions for Research (DSSR) inaugurated end of November its new vector supercomputer, a NEC SX-5 with 16 processors. DSSR is a joint venture of DLR (German Aerospace Center) and debis Systemhaus, which is engaged in the Hoechstleistungsrechner fuer Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft GmbH (HWW HPC for science and industry) in Stuttgart. HWW is a joint enterprise of debis Systemhaus (40%), Porsche AG (10%) and the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and the Universities of Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart (50%). This computer opens new dimensions for the great challenges in research and industry.
On November 30, the supercomputer NEC SX-5 was inaugurated at DLR in Brunswick. It is one of the biggest systems in Europe. It is a parallel vector supercomputer of the newest technology with 16 processors, a peak performance of 64 GFlop/s (billion of floating point operations per second) and 64 Gbyte of main, shared memory. Its architecture is characterised by an extremely fast memory access. All processors fetch and store data with a bandwidth of about 500 MByte/s between processors and memory.
This system is the largest single system, but clustering of several machines with a high-speed interconnect is possible. It replaces two predecessors located at Brunswick and Goettingen but delivers the eight-fold performance. Progress in data transfer and networking allowed the acquisition of one high-performance system instead of two medium sized machines at the two locations.
Beneath the reduced costs, the system offers the possibility to attack grand challenges in aerospace research. It improves the possibility for DLR to get research contracts from government and industrial enterprises for aerospace and automotive. The NEC SX-5 will be integrated into the infrastructure of HWW. They offer very high security standards, which is necessary when using the same computer in academia and industrial research.
Uwe Harms |
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