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Supercomputing Technology

NEC SX-9 to be World's Fastest Vector Computer 137

Posted by CowboyNeal from the better-faster-stronger dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NEC has announced the NEC SX-9 claiming it to be the fastest vector computer, with single core speeds of up to 102.4 GFLOPS and up to 1.6TFLOPS on a single node incorporating multiple CPUs. The machines can be used in complex large-scale computation, such as climates, aeronautics and space, environmental simulations, fluid dynamics, through the processing of array-handling with a single vector instruction. Yes, it runs a UNIX System V-compatible OS."
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NEC SX-9 to be World's Fastest Vector Computer More

NEC SX-9 to be World's Fastest Vector Computer

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  • Oh? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SnoopJeDi ( 859765 )

    Yes, it runs a UNIX System V-compatible OS.


    Of course, but the true question is...

    Does it run Linux.

    Cue the redundant replies and grouchy mods.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by azulza ( 651826 )
      Of course, but the true question is...

      Does it run Vista, without being a slow mofo.

      Cue redundant linux rants / MS bash

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        ...MS made Bash?

        • Re:Oh? (Score:5, Funny)

          by colourmyeyes ( 1028804 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @03:11AM (#21125649)
          user@host:~ $ ls
          You are about to list the files in this directory.
          Are you sure you want to do this? [y/n] y

          Enter Administrator password:

          We're sorry, using MS Bash 4.00 Basic you do not have
          the proper privilege level to view system files.
          Please purchase MS Bash 4.00 Mega, Ultra, or Extreme.
          Would you like to purchase one of these products now? [y/n] y

          We're sorry, this product is not upgradeable. Please
          reinstall your operating system, choosing "clean install"
          during the upgrade process. Thank you for choosing the
          rich user experience provided by MS Bash 4.00.

          MS Bash must now restart your computer.

    • Quite possibly. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:09AM (#21124777) Homepage Journal
      The architecture (a vector processor) is not in the vanilla kernel, but the kernel is fairly parallel, thread-safe and SMP-safe, so I really can't see any reason why you couldn't put Linux on such a platform. Because a lot of standard parallel software these days assumes a cluster of discrete nodes with shared resources, they'd be best borrowing code from Xen and possibly MOSIX to simulate a common structure.

      (This would waste some of the compute power, but if the total time saved from not changing the application exceeds the time that could be saved using more of the cycles available, you win. It is this problem of creating illusions of whatever architecture happens to be application-friendly at a given time that has made much of my work in parallel architectures - such as the one produced by Lightfleet - so interesting... and so subject to office politics.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Kristoph ( 242780 )
        A user would pay the extremely high cost of a supercomputer - with it's proprietary memory architecture and interconnects - precisely because it can much more effectively scale up parallel processes then a cluster. If the benefit of that did not outweigh the cost of tailoring software to fit the device then these devices would never be made.

        ]{

        • Re:Quite possibly. (Score:5, Informative)

          by Calinous ( 985536 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @01:25AM (#21125239)
          The cost of the supercomputers is so high, that sometimes several man-month of tailoring the software to run as efficient as possible on the hardware could be recovered during a couple of days of processing.
                For the kind of computation the supercomputer market requests, a 5% improvement in running speed on a supercomputer can worth millions

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Chrisq ( 894406 )
            This was certainly the case when I used vector processors. It is possible that the vector processor does not run an OS at all. It has been many years since I have worked on such a beast but when I did we ran a loader system with a standard OS which would cross compile code for the processor and load it almost onto the hardware (there was actually a small program we called a monitor to deal with I/O, etc, but no multi-tasking, security or anything). It would then run and the results were read back into the f

            • Re:Quite possibly. (Score:5, Informative)

              by bockelboy ( 824282 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @07:48AM (#21127281)
              That's the current, popular, Blue Gene/L architecture. The Blue Genes are composed of densely packed boards, each of which has a PowerPC chip and many vector processors. The PowerPC chips run a Linux-like OS and do some normal-looking I/O (filesystems, networking, etc), while the vector processors churn lots of data and have simplistic I/O.

              That GP who suggests that Xen is used to distribute tasks obviously isn't familiar with the needs of big iron.
              • I think you are mistaken. There are no vector processors in blue gene/L. BG/l is composed entirely of IBM ppc/440 cores. Each node (out of 65,000) is composed of 2 ppc scalar cores. In most cases one runs the application, and one handles the message passing. The Blue Gene/P uses 4-core nodes, but is otherwise similar.

                The cell processor has many scalar cores, which can be programmed to behave a little-bit like a vector processor, though they really aren't. Cell processors are not currently used in Blue-Gene

            • This was certainly the case when I used vector processors. It is possible that the vector processor does not run an OS at all. It has been many years since I have worked on such a beast but when I did we ran a loader system with a standard OS which would cross compile code for the processor and load it almost onto the hardware (there was actually a small program we called a monitor to deal with I/O, etc, but no multi-tasking, security or anything). It would then run and the results were read back into the f

      • Re:Quite possibly. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SamP2 ( 1097897 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:52AM (#21125097)
        CAN run Linux and RUNS Linux are not quite the same thing.

        To put things in perspective, 99% of PCs in the world CAN run Linux. :-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by anarxia ( 651289 )
          Calling this a PC (Personal Computer) is a bit of a stretch :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by deniable ( 76198 )
        The front end OS for these things is pretty meaningless. Being a Unix like will keep the programmers and admins happy. The front-end is only a shell for the code running on the back-end processing units. These do all of the work and rely on specific hardware, instructions, and libraries to do things in *actual* parallel. These things basically exist to run big number crunching tasks for mathematicians and mathematicians in disguise like physicists. :) These people will generally be running their own code wi
      • The NEC processor is modern in its memory protection, so linux could easily be ported, however, there's a lot of time/money invested in super/ux so there's little incentive to do so. Even if linux were ported, it wouldn't be like the linux running on your desktop, it would be a stripped-down kernel, and some basic libraries.

        I don't know what you're talking about with Xen and mosix. Neither seem at all applicable to the sort of software run on big-iron machines like this. NEC SX machines run code written for
      • When we were porting System V to the ETA 10 supercomputer (a short vector machine) one of the hardware engineers came running over one day with the devastating news that the vector square root instruction didn't work on all the test machines. We gravely told him that we would take all of them out of of the Unix kernel.

    • Come on, we need to know, what is the default editor, vi or emacs? We need to know.

  • Forget esoteric units, how fast is it in Playstation3s per foot-second?

    • Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS? (Score:5, Funny)

      by thedarknite ( 1031380 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:13AM (#21124805) Homepage
      What's with these new fangled measurements.

      I'd like to know what it is in Libraries of Congress per Jiffy

    • Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS? (Score:4, Funny)

      by PresidentEnder ( 849024 ) <wyvernender@gmai ... com minus author> on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:14AM (#21124829) Journal
      Your units don't cancel properly. Flops = floating point operations / second, PS3s / foot-second = physical object / (viscosity / weight). You could stretch PS3s to be units of processing power / time, which gives you processing power / time / viscosity, which we'll fudge to be about flops / viscosity.

      I dunno: maybe this thing could run faster at higher temperatures in lower gravity?

      (/pretending to know what I'm talking about)

      • Re:GFLOPS? TFLOPS? (Score:4, Funny)

        by sqrt(2) ( 786011 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @01:26AM (#21125241) Journal

        Your units don't cancel properly...
        Oh no, physics class flashback! No! NOOOOOOOO! I don't want to do this whole equation again!
      • I guess a more accurate question would be, how high a stack of PS3s running in parallel would you need to equal this thing's processing power? I so can't be bothered...
        • ~10000 would be a good guess.

          Quote [physorg.com]: "Mueller, an associate professor of computer science, has built a supercomputing cluster capable of both high-performance computing and running the latest in computer gaming. His cluster of eight PS3 machines - the first such academic cluster in the world - packs the power of a small supercomputer, but at a total cost of about $5,000, it costs less than some desktop computers that have only a fraction of the computing power.
          ...
          Mueller estimates that with approximatel
    • Funnily enough - this isn't totally irrelevant.

      In 2000, IBM, Toshiba and Sony collaborated to create a Cell processor, consisting of one scalar processor and eight vector processors, for the Sony PlayStation 3.
      - Wikipedia.org
    • I'm not sure about that, but I hear it can make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

  • Logical question: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by r_jensen11 ( 598210 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:09AM (#21124773)
    So, aside from having all of this power in one centralized spot, how does this compare to the combined power used for distributed computing projects like ClimatePrediction.net, fold@home, and any other project on Boinc?
    • Something people constantly misunderstand about supercomputers is that they assume that all problems can be broken apart into manageable portions that can be split among thousands of computers. Many problems exist that have vast memory requirements and/or require interaction among all parts of the problem, and so have to be run on a single supercomputer.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ajs318 ( 655362 )

        Something people constantly misunderstand ..... is that they assume that all problems can be broken apart into manageable portions that can be split

        Exactly! Having sex 39 times does not mean you will be able to get a baby in one week. Some operations are by nature sequential -- and while there is scope for some parallelisation, doing so in a highly-distributed fashion can end up increasing latency, because you end up spending more time splitting the data up and putting the results back together than act

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by sophanes ( 837600 )
      Put simply, the problem set that vector processors are geared towards (those involving large matrix ops) are the type clusters perform horribly at.

    • Re:Logical question: (Score:5, Informative)

      by deniable ( 76198 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:42AM (#21125031)
      Well, distributed is often seen as poor-mans parallel, but in this case they don't compare. Vector units have large arrays of data and perform the same operation on all of them at once. Think array or matrix operations being done in one step rather than needing loops. This is where a SIMD architecture takes off.

      The only unit I ever got to play with had a 64x32 grid of processors, you could add a row of numbers in log2(n) steps instead on n. It was cool because you could tell each processor to grab a value from the guy next to him (or n steps in a given direction from him) and so on. You could calculate dot products of matrices very quickly.

      The distributed stuff you mentioned is mostly farming. Take a big loop of independent steps, break them up and pass them out to a (possibly) heterogeneous collection of processing nodes. Collect the answers when they finish. Render farms work the same way. It's a good way to break up some problems, but it's not what a vector unit does.

      Now, I haven't touched this stuff for eleven years so my facts are possibly wrong. I'm sure someone will be along to correct me.
    • Hate to burst your bubble, but while grid computing can certainly achieve strong speeds, it is not quite AS fast as you might think.

      The entire SETI@HOME [wikipedia.org] project (biggest grid computing project on the net) pumps out 274 teraflops. By comparison, Blue Gene L [wikipedia.org] (first in series) pumps out 360 teraflops, and newer versions will achieve petaflop range, much faster than similar anticipation for grid computing projects.

      Sure, you might say, that just like supercomputers evolve, so does grid computing. The probl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by renoX ( 11677 )
        Does the figures for the Blue Gene are real or just the maximum possible?

        Quite often what you can achieve on a particular problem is much less than what the computer is theoretically capable (say 10%).

    • careful now: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Nirvelli ( 851945 )
      Don't forget the Storm project!
    • Eventually, the combined power of the Boinc architecture will be much larger than any supercomputer in terms of CPU, yet be total insufficient for any of the supercomputer's task.

      Here's the experiment I've used to teach the concepts: Take a deck of cards, shuffle it, and time yourself sorting it. Now, have 1 other person help you sort it - it should be about 2 times as fast, maybe a little slower.

      Repeat again with increasing number of people until you have 1 card per person. You now have a room full of b

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      It doesn't compare at all.

      They are not used for the same type of problems. Some problems are ideal for cluster systems like the ones you have described. Others are are ideal for Vector systems like the SX. They don't compair well at all because they are not used for the same type of problem.

    • Well, the answer depends on your problem. These are sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum from distributed. There are a lot of solutions in between. In order from cheapest to most expensive per flop.

      Distributed computing needs to do a lot of computation on very tiny bits of data. You can pack up the problem set and send it over the internet, then do an hour or two of work on a CPU, and send another internet-sized transfer back. It's very economical, only cares about raw cpu performance, and can't be u

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kjs3 ( 601225 )
      Not all problems lend themselves to a distributed solution.

  • I can see the ads now (Score:3, Funny)

    by UnixUnix ( 1149659 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:10AM (#21124783) Homepage
    "Easter Island's Weather Forecasting Service believes operation of the NEC SX-9 would realize a 53% savings under Windows Server 2008 compared to under UNIX"
    • 53% savings, 100% loss in function. I personally don't know of any version of Windows that can run on a vector CPU.
      • Exactly! :-)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        Exactly, you could save a lot of money by keeping this machine turned off!
  • "SCO files umpteen bazzillion dollar lawsuit against NEC"

  • Does it play vector games? (Score:5, Funny)

    by filesiteguy ( 695431 ) <perfectreign@gmail.com> on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:13AM (#21124811)

    I wonder how well it will do with the really cool vector games like Asteroids or BattleZone or Tempest or...


    ...Star Wars! Yeah, we could take this little baby, setup a sit-down booth, add some speakers and we'd be set!



    "what's your vector, Victor?"

  • Why, that's more powerful than a cluster of 60 PS3s! I'll take three!

  • Impressive ... (Score:2, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *

    with single core speeds of up to 102.4 GFLOPS and up to 1.6TFLOPS on a single node incorporating multiple CPUs.

    Don't be too proud of this technological marvel you have created for it is nothing compared to the power of the slashdot effect.

  • SCO!? (Score:3, Funny)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:40AM (#21125017)
    Did they buy a license from SCO?
  • There's an interesting paper [huji.ac.il] that analyzes the data accumulated in the top500 list site [top500.org], which ranks the 500 most powerful supercomputers twice a year: it shows that, over time, the share of vector machines within the list is sharply declining, both in aggregated power and in number: from around 60% in 1993 to around 10% in 2003 (see Figure 3, page 6, in said paper). Still, vector machines refuse to die and always seem to maintain a presence in the top500, as is evident from the above slashdot post. Will ve

    • Will vector machines live forever?

      Well, I actually doubt it. You could say 'those vector processors are used for matrix calculations and are wildly different from general purpose CPUs' and you'd be right.

      However, I could see a point in time where hybrids like the Cell (one scalar processor and eight vector processors) will become so cheap that the number of vector machines will decline even more.

      The idea will never die of course, I mean, hardware is so flexible nowadays that a good student could make

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by putaro ( 235078 )
        I haven't looked closely but I would guess (based on having worked at a manufacturer of vector supercomputers many years ago) that all of the machines represented on the Top 500 list are hybrid machines. All of the vector architectures I'm familiar with had a scalar processor to handle most of the housekeeping, run the OS, compilers and things like that. Vector processors aren't very good at doing things like that.

        Vector excel at running through essentially loop operations. There's two components to thei
        • The consequence of the parent post is that code can be run very fast on a vector machine IF it is written in such a way to take full advantage of the vector architecture, using smartly written loops. Now it is a good idea to have such loops in your high-performance-computing code anyway, but since not everyone is writing a whole scientific software package from scratch each time a new computer is available, most codes used now are optimized for either shared memory or cluster systems. (It would be nice if

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by putaro ( 235078 )

            Realize that most scientific code probably still has lots of code in it written for the original CRAY system it ran on in the 80's, and you see why vector systems will live on for a while: code that was written for one will have to be used on a vector system. One has to have to luck to find a PhD student willing and able to rewrite the code for a new machine.

            Worse than that even. I was doing this back in the late 80's/early 90's and we spent a large amount of energy getting the FORTRAN compiler to automatically vectorize "dusty deck" (that would be code that was originally written on PUNCHCARDS) scientific code.

            Parallel programming is hard. Vectorized code is kind of like parallel light in that it parallelizes very narrow operations without all that messy locking and message passing.

            Oh, there was one thing that the vector excelled at that OS's do a lot of -

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rhys ( 96510 )
        What do you think your Pentium's MMX instructions are? They're vector operations. Every machine on the list is already a hybrid between the two. They aren't dedicated individual vector processors under the command of a master GP-CPU, but a different version of hybridization.

        I'd actually suggest that you'll probably see vector processors marginalized or pushed out eventually by stream processors: aka nvidia/ati graphics boards.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by flaming-opus ( 8186 )
        So here's what you're missing: Vector processors aren't about doing a lot of math. True, they do that very well, but that's not where they excell. Where vector processors really shine, is in memory bandwidth. Vector operations let you use that 4Terabyte/second of memory bandwidth, and actually use it, not spend it all flushing out cache lines. On this machine, a single load instruction can fetch 2KB of data.

        Cell (and many GPUs or future whatever) have the ability to do a LOT of math, but they do it on a ver

  • "up to" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:46AM (#21125057) Homepage
    The only text that can ever follow the words "up to" in computing is "0.1 *". As in "speeds of up to 0.1 * 102.4 GFLOPS". Every time a marketing droid published a press release, a kitten dies.

    • I particularly liked:

      This new computer features the addition of an arithmetic unit and an increased number of vector pipelines. This has resulted in the development of the fastest single-chip vector processor with a computing performance of 102.4 GFLOPS per single core, and a wide memory bandwidth of 256GB/s. With a single node incorporating up to 16 CPU, computing performance in excess of 1.6TFLOPS is achieved.

      So, these are 'core solos'?

    • With a single node incorporating up to 16 CPU

      "up to" in computing is "0.1 *".
      Heh, so there's nodes with 1.6 CPUs? How does a three-fifth of a cpu look like? Will they call it Tertium?
  • one can only imagine what a game of 'tail gunner' or tempest would look like on this machine.
  • Vector graphics are so 1980's... oh wait

  • Yes, it runs a UNIX System V-compatible OS


    I was reading the description of the system, and thinking I would never be able to operate it as I am such a dinosaur until I saw the above line. My response is: "This is Unix, I know this!"
  • To keep this to the shortest set of discussion threads ever for ./, let's get right out there with:
    • Yeah, but does it run Linux?
    • I, for one, welcome our new complex large-scale computation climate-adjusting, environment-simulating overlord
    • Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
    • Useless, they didn't open source the hardware
    • Finally, a machine that can run Vista
    • Bet it infringes hundreds of chair-throwing M$ patents

    • Hmm, did I forget any ...

    • Dang, took too long to type. Oh well, have to revert back to other less trustworthy and stable things than the ./ karma system as the foundation for my self-esteem.

    • Hmm, did I forget any ...
      • Does it have hot grits and nekkid Amidalas inside?
      • Oog the caveman will beat it up
      • In soviet russia, vectors are faster than you (wtf?)
      • idk my bff jill
    • Just don't try to patent the multi-meme-karma-whoring method. I'll claim prior art and embarass your lawyers. No, wait, you really can't embarass a patent lawyer. No, that's not right, you can't embarass any lawyer. Anyways, I'll do something.

  • Link to more information (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tom Womack ( 8005 ) <tom@womack.net> on Friday October 26, 2007 @05:11AM (#21126327) Homepage
    http://www.nec.de/hpc/hardware/sx-series/index.html [www.nec.de]

    There are four PDFs there; the brochure is a four-colour glossy, but there is some real information. Sadly, the interesting-looking white papers are for the SX6, two generations earlier.

    SX9 summary: 65nm technology, 3.2GHz clock speed, eight vector elements handled per cycle with two multiply and two add units, which is where the 102.4Gflop/CPU figure comes from. 16 CPUs in a box about the size of a standard 42U rack.

    Totally absurdly fast (ten 64-bit words per cycle per CPU) access to a large (options are 512GB or 1TB) shared main memory; absurdly fast (128GB/second) inter-node bandwidth.
    • NEC keeps plugging along at the cpu's. Those things are incredible. They are, however, VERY VERY vector dependant. They do not run scalar code very fast at all. This many pipe-sets and ALUs per pipe requires very long vector lengths to vectorize well. What I'd love to see is one of these vector CPUs tied very closely to a high-speed scalar CPU like an opteron, xeon, or power6. For a while it sounded like IBM was getting back into the vector game with a power6-derived processor, but that seems to have faded
  • have obligatory cluster yay retarded replies. Firstly ... I highly doubt this is running linux on the vector part of the core itself, more likely than anything it has a von Neumann machine on the core somewhere or even separately and I will say the obvious here...which I am sure everyone here knows (especialy those people yelling retarded cluster noises) parallelization is as only good as the algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law) ... a vector computer is like a bigger version of a GPU with

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by juanfgs ( 922455 )
      you must be new here.
    • "...a vector computer is like a bigger version of a GPU..."

      So instead of using these in a Beowulf cluster we could use them to get a killer (no pun) framerate in Battlefield??
  • There is a video news release and interview with the project manager here: http://movie.diginfo.tv/2007/10/26/07-0502-r.php [diginfo.tv]

  • wow... "imagine a Beowulf cluster of those"...

  • FLOPS are useless (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How many BogoMips does it have? =)

  • Unicos and Cray (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @08:57AM (#21127937)
    Whenever I hear "supercomputer" and Unix I think of using a Cray and Unicos, which was the version of Unix that ran on them. Unicos was, at least the version I used, the ultimate in bare-bones Unix. I think when people think of Unix today they think of something like Linux or the BSDs or OS X, or whatever where the environment is very rich with tools. Unix on a supercomputer is not much more than an interface between your C (or Fortran) program and the bare metal; they don't (again, in my experience) make it the kind of environment you *use*...you get your code on the machine, compile it, submit it, and log off and wait for an email.

    Maybe this NEC machine is different but Unix on a supercomputer is like the cockpit of a Forumula 1 race car; just there to provide a way to steer, comforts be damned.
    • Supercomputer OSes, like all unix OSes, have gained functionality over the years. In the supercomputing world, data storage and I/O performance are almost as important as the computational job. Thus a lot of attention is paid to filesystems.
      super/UX is pretty stripped down, but getting better. Cray Unicos is no longer based on that system-V stuff and is either based on Irix on the X1, or is linux-derived on the XT4. The compute nodes are pretty stripped down, but the loggin nodes are pretty much off the she
    • The completeness of the *ix environment (real X11 port, vectorizing ANSI C compiler, etc) was one thing that drew customers to Convex vector machines back in the day.

  • he SX-9 closes in on the PFLOPS (one quadrillion floating point operations per second) range by achieving a processing performance of 839 TFLOPS.

    Pretty fast, but IBM will release its Roadrunner [wikipedia.org] at Los Alamos NL next year with 1.6PFLOPS:

    The computer is designed for a performance level of 1.6 petaflops peak and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. [...] It will be a hybrid design with more than 16,000 AMD Opteron cores (~2200 IBM x3755 4U servers, each holding four dual core

    • There are several petaflop machines in their initial phases of roll-out right now, but peak performance isn't the only number worth paying attention to. The SX-9 is an amazing architecture, with orders of magnitude more bandwidth than the roadrunner system, both in interconnect, and in memory bandwidth. It's also a very expensive machine. The SX, however, has an advantage of being an update and refinement to a very established architecture. codes written for the SX-3 are going to perform well on the sx-9.

      Ro

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