NEC Strikes Back With SX-8 Supercomputer

News for nerds writes "It was just 3 weeks ago that we learned IBM's BlueGene/L with 36.01 TFlops edged out NEC's Earth Simulator, but today NEC announces a new SX-8 supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65 TFlops (press release). It may be available in the U.S. as Cray's OEM like SX-6."

It's like

[Moby Cock]

This is like an arms race of yesteryear. The Germans and the Brits with their battleships, the Americans and Soviets with there nukes, the Yankees and Red Sox with payroll. Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.

Re:Real-world applications?

[jstave]

It's very impressive and all, but how is this going to benefit me down the line? It's not like they're affordable to small/medium businesses like the Cray or HP's highly valued Alpha DEC workstations.

Are you kidding? A couple years from now you'll be seeing these things, shrink wrapped, on the shelves at Best Buy.

65 TFlop is only an estimate

[foobar3149]

The 65 TFlop for the SX-8 is only an estimate while the 36 TFlop for BlueGene/L was real performance. So it is not certain that SX-8 will be faster than Blue Gene/L

Re:It's like

[Timesprout]

Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.

Yes because this sort of computing power holds no attraction to the military for weapon modeling purposes or to the untouchables running echelon type programs.

Re:65 TFlop is only an estimate

[Too Much Noise]

You're trying to say they could have overestimated the performance by almost 100%? Coming from the people that actually built what was until recently the fastest supercomputer, that's extremely doubtful.

Also, the performance per-CPU and per-node is most likely real data, as they say the SX-8 would ship in December.

Re:I'd stick with IBM

[Bishop923]

on a side note: Where does Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory get all that money to keep buying the latest and greatest super computer

LLNL does nuclear research (basically simulating nuclear weapon detonations). We spend $400 Billion on defense per year, what is $200 - $300 million for the latest and greatest super-computer?

Re:NEC SX-8: Predecessor of M-5

[glgraca]

So chinese and korean bigots consider themselves equal to americans, whose bigots, on the other hand, consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity.

Re:65 TFlop is only an estimate

[flaming-opus]

It's probably a pretty good estimate, as this is just a clock speed bump and packaging update to the sx-6 (earth simulator).

An equally important criticism is that they've only announced the POSSIBILITY of building a 65TF system. No one has actually ordered one. The cray X1 can scale up to 50TF if fully populated. The X1E scales up to 150TF. This is of no great consequence, as the largest one in production is only 10TF. Yes they could build a really big sx-8, but it cost $200M to build the earth simulator, probably something similar to build this thing.

There are a lot of computers that are really cool - on paper.

Re:NEC SX-8: Predecessor of M-5

[DerekLyons]

I suggest that NEC donate computing time on an SX-8 to all the startups designing spaceships (e.g. SpaceShipOne). These startups are short on cash and cannot afford the kind of supercomputer that is needed for modeling the spaceships.

Did slashdot suffer a timewarp and send the message I'm replying to from 1974 to 2004?

We have more than sufficient computer power on our desktops to do the maths needed for a designing something like SpaceShip One. What's killing the startups isn't lack of cash, but lack of experience (both individually and across the industry) needed to make valid and rational engineering tradeoffs. (Not to mention that they aren't building for a market, but in hope of a market, thus making the design/tradeoff process even harder. Nobody knows what to design *to*.)