Architecture and performance of NEC supercomputer SX system

Abstract The NEC supercomputer SX system is a high-speed, large-scale supercomputer designed for scientific and engineering computations. It features 16 vector pipelines with a vector peak speed of 1.3 Gflops, a simplified scalar design with a control and arithmetic processor, and 256 Mbytes of main memory with 512 banks. To achieve the ease-of-use, the standard vectorizing FORTRAN, various performance tuning tools and the operating system with various features are supported.