Vector engine processor SX-Aurora TSUBASA

x86server

NEC have developed a Vector Engine (VE) for accelerated computing using vectorization, with the concept that the full application runs on the high performance Vector Engine and the operating system tasks are taken care of by the Vector Host (VH), which is a standard x86 server. This is the first time that the NEC SX series vector processor is integrated transparently into the Linux software environment. This allows the Vector Engine to concentrate on providing the best application performance. Building on the successful evolution of the SX-series of vector-supercomputers the next generation of this product line clearly focusses on all aspects of efficiency, NEC have combined the flexibility of a cluster with the raw power of the NEC Vector Engine Processor. Whereas the SX-series has previously been only available to large corporations or compute centers, the Vector Engine is now also available to engineers and HPC enthusiasts all over the world. With the three design concepts vectorization, maximum memory bandwidth and few but strong cores, the new NEC vector architecture gives a strong foundation for high sustained performance. The Vector Engine Processor integrates eight vector-cores and 48 GB of high bandwidth memory (HBM2) providing a peak performance of up to 3.07 TeraFLOPS. The computational efficiency is achieved by the outstanding memory bandwidth of up to 1.53 TB/s per CPU and by the latency-hiding effect of the vector architecture. The single Vector Engine Processor core arithmetic unit can execute 32 double precision floating point operations per cycle with its vector registers holding 256 floating point values.