NRIM orders 256 Gflop/s SX-5

The NRIM SX-5/32H2 is one of the largest SX-5 installations announced to date. It will provide 256 Gflop/s of peak performance from only 32 processors, and will be configured with 128 GB of high performance main memory capacity. Memory bandwidth is 64 GB/s per processor, or 2 TB/s for the aggregate system, making it specifically effective for solutions of large systems of sparse matrixes as well as dense.

It is expected that the introduction of the new SX-5 system, which will begin operation in April, 2000, will contribute to higher efficiency in materials development, such as investigation and understanding of materials physics, and the behavior and microstructures of materials.

NRIM installed a 40 Gflop/s NEC SX-4 parallel vector system in 1995 which led to advances in research activities such that it has become oversubscribed. In addition to the regular flow of projects, NRIM simulations have been continuously improved through increasingly higher resolutions of analysis and the introduction of more variable cases for each study. In order to service the escalating load, more powerful computational facilities were mandated.