NEC has trumped US computer makers once again by announcing a new supercomputer that destroys previous performance marks. The "SX-8" is a follow on to NEC's Earth Simulator, which held the supercomputing top spot for some time. The new machine can reach a peak performance of 65 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second). The Earth Simulator topped out at 40 teraflops.
More importantly from a political and bragging rights standpoint, NEC has brought the supercomputing crown back to Japan. IBM,
last month managed to unseat NEC with its Blue Gene/L system that posted a sustained performance of 36 teraflops. Earth Simulator only posted a sustained performance of 35.86 teraflops. While NEC did not immediately release sustained performance numbers for SX-8, it's expected to go well past both of the older systems.
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The Register
Oct 21, 2004, 08:07 AM
