NLR installs NEC SX-5 - Fastest supercomputer in the NetherlandsLondon 15 Aug 99 New aircraft, be it civil ones or military, tend to make complex and heavy demands on both material, aerodynamics and avionics disciplines. To shorten time-to-market and to enhance reliability increasing demands are placed on multidisciplinary development (concurrent engineering) and this relies also on available large scale computing power. The Airbus 3XX program and Boeing 777 development are typical examples. In the last few years, the industry has been relying on computational electromagnetic models to solve problems encountered by military planes using stealth technologies to avoid radar detection. Engineers have been developing models to deal with local features, such as joints, or even tiny surface paint scratches, to avoid any scattering which can then be detected by radar pulses and make the aircraft visible. Increasing air traffic from growing air transport is impacting the environment. It can conflict with environmental regulations and also adversly affect dense population areas around airports. For solving problems of this kind on time, large air tracking simulations and noise contours computations are required. The National Aerospace Laboratory NLR is the central institute for aerospace research in the Netherlands. NLR provides scientific and technical support to aerospace industries and organizations all over the world. NLR is a not-for-profit organization with 950 employees, an annual turn-over of 70 Million Euros, of which 75% comes from external contracts. Using its supercomputing power and expertise, NLR contributes in providing optimal solutions, for the above mentioned challenges in aerospace, for various clients. In the last years, for example, NLR has been involved in various projects, such as simulating the aerodynamics of civil aircraft and air combat vehicles, space vehicle aerodynamics, electromagnetic simulations, thermo- mechanics, stress analysis and environmental aspects. NLR also uses the system for related research and development work, as for instance, road traffic simulations. The system is made available for outside users and for this reason it is placed in the NLR high-speed network De-Militarized Zone. NLR was the first European user of NEC SX supercomputers. The diagram shows the growth in supercomputing power at NLR with these systems. NLR has a long business association with NEC-ESS Europe. It bought its first NEC SX-2 machine in 1987. This was replaced by an NEC SX-3 in 1991, an NEC SX-4 in 1996 and now with the latest NEC SX-5 system. This translates to at least two order of magnitude increase of sustained performance, in the last twelve years, for large application problems. NECís SX-Series represents the highest performance offer for technical computing. The latest machine in the SX-Series, the SX-5 is one of the fastest single CPU in the market with a speed of 8 Gflop/s. In January 1999, the SX-5, achieved a sustained performance of 7.219 Gflop/s for one CPU, on the LINPACK TPP standard benchmark. This represents 90.2% of a single CPU peak performance. This remarkable performance is achieved while it preserves all the virtues of the previous SX-4 Series. The SX-5 Series comes in various models. The SX-5/8 (B Model Chassis) can have four, six or eight CPUs, 32Gflop/s, 48Gflop/s, or 64 Gflop/s peak performance, 32 to 64 GBytes of memory and a bandwidth from 256GB/s to 512 GB/s. The NLR system is a maximum SX-5/B system The SX-5/16 (A Model Chassis) can have eight, ten, twelve or sixteen CPUs, i.e. 64Gflop/s, 88Gflop/s, 96 Gflop/s or 128 Gflop/s peak performance, 64 to 128 GBytes of memory and a bandwidth from 512GB/s to 1024 GB/s. The SX-5 Multiple Node Models scale from 1 to 512 CPUs delivering up to 4Tflop/s peak performance, with a maximum memory capacity of 4 TBytes and maximum bandwidth of 32 TB/s. The previous NEC system, the SX-4 Series, with 130 orders for almost 1000 CPUs makes it the most successful supercomputer of its kind. It is installed at major engineering companies like Volkswagen, most Japanese car manufactures and many European Aerospace research centres. For more information on NEC check in at: www.ess.nec.de/
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