NEC SX-6

The SX-6 is a vector supercomputer in NEC's SX series that debuted in 2001 and was also sold in the United States under licence by Cray. One node holds up to eight vector processors that share as much as 64 gigabytes of memory. Each processor is a single chip combining a vector unit and a scalar unit, made in a 0.15 micrometre copper CMOS process, where the earlier SX-5 had spread its processor over several chips. The vector unit has eight pipeline units with seventy-two vector registers of 256 words each, and the 64-bit scalar unit has a 64 kilobyte cache and can issue four instructions per clock cycle. A processor peaks at 8 gigaflops, so a node reaches 64 gigaflops, and up to 128 nodes can be joined through the Internode Crossbar Switch for a multi-node peak of up to 8 teraflops. The Earth Simulator is based on the SX-6 architecture. The machine runs SUPER-UX, NEC's Unix-like operating system, and uses the NQSII batch system by default, with open source batch systems such as Sun Grid Engine also supported.