SX-8R: The world's fastest matrix supercomputer

Japan's NEC Corporation has launched the world new SX-8R supercomputer with a record matrix of 144 Teraflops (trillions per second).

As an upgraded version of SX-8 supercomputer, SX-8R has twice as many arithmetic units as SX-8 and 10% faster than SX-8.

SX-8R is equipped with 4,096 CPU (central processing unit) evenly distributed at 512 intersections (each intersection has 8 CPUs), has 256 GB memory at each intersection and carries out data transmission between deliveries Highway with bandwidth 288 Tbs (trillion bytes / second).

NEC plans to lease the supercomputer for approximately 1,210,000 yen a month and sell about 200 computers from now until the end of the year.

The development of a new generation supercomputer has been carried out on the basis of upgrading the matrix processor in a single cycle at a rate of over 100 Gigaflops (billions of calculations per second).

TOP 10 SUPER WORLD POWERFUL WORLD CURRENTLY

1. BlueGene / L (IBM BlueGene / L series)
- Manufacturer: IBM
- Production year: 2005
- Memory capacity: 32,768 GB
- Processing speed: 208.6 Teraflops

2. BGW (IBM BlueGene / L series)
- Manufacturer: IBM
- Production year: 2005
- CPU number: 40,960
- Processing speed: 114.6 Teraflops

3. ASC Purple (IBM pSeries series)
- Manufacturer: IBM
- Year of manufacture: 2006
- Number of CPUs: 12208
- Memory capacity: 48,832 GB
- Processing speed: 92.7 Teraflops

4. Columbia (SGI Altix line)
- Manufacturer: SGI
- Year of manufacture: 2004
- CPU number: 10,160
- Processing speed: 60.9 Teraflops

5. Tera-10 (Bull SMP Cluster)
- Manufacturer: Bull SA
- Year of manufacture: 2006
- CPU number: 8.704
- Memory capacity: 26,112 GB
- Processing speed: 55.7 Teraflops

6. Thunderbird (Dell PowerEdge Cluster series)
- Manufacturer: Dell
- Year of manufacture: 2006
- CPU number: 9,024
- Processing speed: 64.9 Teraflops

7. Grid Cluster TSUBAME (Sun Fire - Cluster)
- Manufacturer: NEC / SUC
- Year of manufacture: 2006
- CPU number: 10,368
- Memory capacity: 21,248 GB
- Processing speed: 49.8 Teraflops

8. JUBL (IBM BlueGene / L series)
- Manufacturer: NEC / SUC
- Year of manufacture: 2006
- CPU number: 16,384
- Processing speed: 45.8 Teraflops

9. Red Storm (Cray series XT3)
- Manufacturer: Cray Inc.
- Production year: 2005
- CPU number: 10.880
- Processing speed: 43.5 Teraflops

10. Earth-Simulator (NEC Vector series)
- Manufacturer: NEC
- Year of manufacture: 2002
- CPU number: 5.120
- Processing speed: 40.9 Teraflops