NEC SX-9

The NEC SX-9 was a vector supercomputer built by NEC Corporation as part of its SX series and released in the first quarter of 2008. It used an enhanced version of the single-chip vector processor introduced with the SX-6, running at 3.2 GHz with eight-way replicated vector pipes, each having two multiply units and two addition units, for a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS per processor. A scalar unit running at half that speed handled code that could not be vectorized. Up to 16 processors and 1 terabyte of memory could share a single air-cooled node about the size of a standard 42U computer rack, and the series ranged from the single-node SX-9/B with 4 processors up to a maximum configuration of 512 nodes, 8,192 processors and 970 teraFLOPS of peak performance. The operating system was NEC's SUPER-UX, a Unix-like system. The machine was described as having the fastest vector processor core in the world, and a fully equipped system would have been the fastest supercomputer at the time of its release. The German national meteorological service operated two independent SX-9 clusters. The SX-9 was discontinued in 2015.