An Overview of the Hitachi S-3800 Series Supercomputer

Hitachi Ltd. has developed a world-class supercomputer group, the HITACHI S-3000 Series, to meet accelerating demands for higher performance, larger system capacity and greater fitness with established development environments in engineering/scientific community. It comes in two subgroups, the water-cooled S-3800 and the air-cooled S-3600, each consisting of several models. Built on leading-edge hardware technologies, and comprising multiple scalar as well as vector engines, the top-of-the-line S-3800/480 delivers a maximum arithmetic throughput of 32 GFLOPS, an order of magnitude higher than that of the predecessor group S-820. The Series operates under an OSF/1 version of the UNIX® operating system, which provides the users with easy access to a variety of established application packages, as well as Hitachi’s proprietary VOS3/AS. To allow communications with other computing resources and high-power workstations via a high speed network, the Series supports the HIPPI interface. For quick visualization of simulation results, the real-time animation feature developed first for the S-820 is also available.