Posted on Thursday, October 26 2017 @ 12:54 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NEC cooked up a new accelerator product for the HPC market. The company's SX-Aurora TSUBASA is aimed at the AI, machine learning and big data markets. The device features eight vector CPU cores with six HBM2 modules. Each core has a memory bandwidth of 150GB/s and a performance level of 307 gigaflops, resulting in a total memory bandwidth of 1.2TB/s and 2.45 teraflops of performance. Not a lot more specifications to go on here.
NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced the launch of a new high-end HPC product line, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA. This new platform drastically increases processing performance and scalability on real world applications, aiming for the traditional application areas, such as science and engineering, but also targeting the new fields of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data analytics. With this new technology, NEC opens supercomputing to a wide range of new markets, in addition to the traditional HPC arena.
Utilizing cutting-edge chip integration technology, the new product features a complete multi-core vector processor in the form of a card-type Vector Engine (VE), which is developed based on NEC's high-density interface technology and efficient cooling technology.
Kimihiko Fukuda, Executive Vice President, NEC Corporation, said, "The new product addresses the needs of scalar computational capability while still providing the efficiency of a vector architecture. This is accomplished through a tightly integrated complete vector system in the form of a Vector Engine Card."
"We provide a comprehensive range of products to address widely diversified needs, from a deskside tower for the individual scientist, to a high-end system for large computer centers. Compared to NEC's previous generation platform, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA is highly power efficient and compact, providing five times the performance per Watt, and ten times the performance per square meter of floor space."
This new product line is not only binary compatible, it features the same hardware architecture and software environment, which is ideal for software developers and enables users to run the same application for a variety of systems, ranging from a deskside tower to the largest high-end configuration, without having to make changes inside the application.
NEC will present the SX-Aurora TSUBASA at the world's largest international supercomputing conference and exhibition, "SC17," from November 13 to 16, 2017, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.
