NEC and SGI to cooperate in Japan on supercomputer sales

 Tokyo 11 Aug 99 NEC Corporation and SGI Japan, Ltd. have signed a memorandum of understanding for the sales of supercomputers in the high performance computer (HPC) market in Japan. Under the agreement, NEC will offer Origon 200 servers, and SGI will offer SX-5 machines to customers. In this fiscal year's Japanese government procurement, NEC offered its SX-5 Series with SGI's Origin 2000 for Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, and SGI Japan offered SGI's Origin 2000 with NEC's SX-5 Series for Tokyo Institute of Technology Computer Center.

Both companies have agreed and signed a MOU on following:-

  1. NEC provides its parallel vector type supercomputer, SX-5 Series and its next generation models to SGI Japan.

  2. SGI Japan provides SGI's scalar parallel type, Origin 2000 and its next generation models to NEC.

  3. NEC and SGI Japan will accelerate their system integration business through this partnership.

NEC and SGI Japan will finalize the details and are planning to sign the formal agreement by the end of September.

NEC and SGI, the parent company of SGI Japan, have been cooperating in the area of semiconductors for MIPS based RISC architecture microprocessors, and NEC has also marketing SGI's graphics workstation as a part of its system integration business.

NEC has started to sell the world's fastest class vector type supercomputer with the peak performance of 4 teraflops (one trillion floatingpoint operations per second) since June 1998. Also SGI Japan has been marketing SGI's scalar parallel supercomputer, Origin 2000, which adopts the cc-NUMA (Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture and is scalable up to 256 CPUs, since October 1996.

In this fiscal year's Japanese government procurement, NEC offered its SX-5 Series with SGI's Origin 2000 for Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, and SGI Japan offered SGI's Origin 2000 with NEC's SX-5 Series for Tokyo Institute of Technology Computer Center.

In the area of advance scientific and technology research field today, the role of HPC becomes very crucial. The need for the high-performance vector type supercomputer and scalar parallel supercomputer with high cost performance and scalability are increasing in the market such as universities and government research facilities. The trend in commercial supercomputer market is to use both vector type and scalar parallel type supercomputer depending on the application.

The two companies have formed the sales partnership in order to respond to such market trend and to provide the best solutions for customers with the integrated system that combine the two companies' products. Through the relationship in the area of semiconductors and workstations, NEC and SGI Japan have agreed on sales cooperation to this new alliance.

 

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