KEY POINTS:
Japan's NEC has taken a serious swing at the supercomputing crown, today releasing its SX-9 - which it claims is the fastest vector computer in the world.
NEC claims that the new machine's theoretical peak processing grunt of 839 TFlops (trillion floating point operations per second) will blow IBM's BlueGene/L - installed at a US Department of Energy site - from the top spot on the TOP500 list of the world's top supercomputers.
The BlueGene/L at the DoE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number one spot for the fourth straight time with 280.6 Tflops.
The TOP500 is compiled twice each year.
BlueFern, a BlueGene/L installed at Canterbury University - under a $5 million lease deal with IBM - is currently entrenched in the number 99 spot.
NEC says the SX-9 is packing the a newly-designed CPU capable of running 102.4 gigaflops per single processor core. It uses existing vector architecture but with more pipelines and an on-chip arithmetic unit. Each node incorporates 16 CPUs.
It is also smaller and more energy efficient compared to earlier NEC SXs, which the company says is a combination of advanced LSI (large scale integration) circuit design, and high-density packing technology.
Aside from its newly developed CPU, it says shared LSI memory of up to a terabyte, and 128GB-capable interconnects can be credited for the success.
IBM lifted the covers on a new version of the BlueGene system, called BlueGene/P earlier this year.
It claims to be capable of more than a petaflop (a quadrillion floating-point operations) of continuous processing power, and over three petaflops in certain configurations.
The next round of supercomputer rankings will be released on November 14th at the Supercomputing Conference in Nevada.
