NEC founds new HPC company for Europe

Dr. Stadler: We have been a business unit or department of NEC Germany. The main focus of our sales organisation was the vector computer business. We sold machines all over Europe and have been successful here. Thus we felt home in Europe and want to strengthen our future, not only delivering vector computer.

Primeur: What was the reason to start a new HPCE GmbH in Düsseldorf?

Dr. Stadler: We build it on the history of ESS. First, we broaden our spectrum of computer architectures. Clearly, we sell and support the vector computer architecture of the NEC SX-series. Additionally, we add the TX7 series of Itanium based SMP (symmetrical multiprocessor) computers. Currently, we offer the TX7 with up to 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors. This is a major step into a market leader processor architecture. In the past we built and sold Linux clusters based on AMD or Intel IA-32 processors. But now, we officially put these architectures into our portfolio. More than one year ago we installed an AMD cluster in the crash development department and extended it last year to nearly up to 400 processors.

Another reason was the flexibility. Selling a high-end NEC SX-6 supercomputer, is a multi-million euro business. There our headquarter is involved. But selling a 100 000 euro or less Linux cluster requires a fast response. Now we can act more flexible and present European offerings.

The business reached a volume that made it appropriate to concentrate it in one GmbH and not in a business unit. We expect a good success with our portfolio.

Primeur: Now, you have the Intel Itanium 2 processor in your offering. This processor is used in the commercial market too. Are you planning to enter it?

Dr. Stadler: We have a deep expertise in the scientific and technical market. We understand the questions in the crash simulation, the flow around a car or climate simulations. That is the market where we come from. We know that SAP R/3 and Oracle have a high priority in the commercial market, but we have no experience. Thus we only concentrate on the scientific and technical sector. This means no SAP or Oracle.

Primeur: Is hardware selling the only task of HPCE GmbH?

Dr. Stadler: We see an increasing need in services and we can offer a lot of support in different areas. It starts with the conventional maintenance of the computers for example the NEC SX-6, probably the PC-clusters. Another topic is the system integration and the systems operations, tuning and optimising applications and can end with education and training. We have a well-qualified service and tuning organisation in Stuttgart which was involved in porting and optimising software from Independent Software Vendors.

Primeur: What do you mean with system integration?

Dr. Stadler: We are free to add components of other vendors into our components and computers to deliver our customer a complete solution. He need not have to buy them himself. An example is integrating a tape robot into our offering and delivering it. Thus the customer need not care of other parts.

Primeur: How are you going to Europe, as you have Europe in your HPCE name?

Dr. Stadler: We have experts in all countries and will open successively offices in the most important countries: the United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, Switzerland and a bit later in Italy.

Primeur: In the US, one often hears of huge amounts of costs for a NEC vector processor. Can you perhaps give some examples of the list prices? We both know that the real price is part of negotiations.

Dr. Stadler: An 8 GFlop/s, 8 GByte one processor office computer is including software in the range of 120 000 euro. The list price of one node of an SX-6 with 8 CPUs, 64 GFlop/s and 64 GByte memory is in the range of 2 million euro. But you have to take into account that you get a higher application efficiency than using standard RISC or Intel IA-32 processors.

Primeur: Thank you and good luck with this new NEC start-up.