NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA

[1][2] Unlike previous SX supercomputers, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA is provided as a PCIe card, termed by NEC as a "Vector Engine" (VE).

SX-Aurora TSUBASA is a successor to the NEC SX series and SUPER-UX, which are vector computer systems upon which the Earth Simulator supercomputer is based.

Its hardware consists of x86 Linux hosts with vector engines (VEs) connected via PCI express (PCIe) interconnect.

[5] Operating system functionality for the VE is offloaded to the VH and handled mainly by user space daemons running the VEOS.

[6] Depending on the clock frequency (1.4 or 1.6 GHz), each VE CPU has eight cores and a peak performance of 2.15 or 2.45 TFLOPS in double precision.

NEC is currently selling the SX-Aurora TSUBASA vector engine integrated into four platforms:[12][9] Within a VH node VEs can communicate with each other through PCIe.

NEC also used to sell the SX-Aurora TSUBASA vector engine integrated into five platforms: All types are exclusively air cooled with the exception of the A500 series, which also utilizes watercooling.

[15] Offloading operating system services to the VH shifts OS jitter away from the VE at the expense of increased latencies.