SX architecture

SX architecture is the name of a series of supercomputer developed by NEC Corporation and marketed jointly with Cray. SX supercomputers are constructed in a doubly parallel manner. A number of processors are arranged into a Parallel computing Vector processor node. These nodes are then installed in a regular Symmetric multiprocessing arrangement.

=Latest system=

The SX-6 is the current model of SX architecture supercomputer. It is the fastest general purpose supercomputer system on the market as of August 2005. The SX-6 Central processing unit operates at 8 FLOPS and can address up to 128 Gigabyte of memory. Up to 8 CPUs may be used in a single PVP node, and a complete system may have up to 128 nodes. There are 4 models of SX-6 computers available through Cray: SX-6i; SX-6/4B; SX-6/8A; and SX-6/256M32. Custom SX-6 systems can also be ordered from NEC.

=Software environment=

All SX supercomputers run the SUPER-UX operating system, and come with Fortran and C plus plus compilers. Cray has also developed an Ada compiler which is available as an option. Some Vertical application are available through NEC, but in general customers are expected to develop much of their own software.

In addition to commercial applications, there is a wide body of free software for the UNIX environment which can be compiled and run on SUPER-UX, such as GCC, Emacs, and vim (text editor).

=External Links=

*[http://www.cray.com/products/sx6/index.html Cray s product page for the SX-6]