The problem is, the new customers to HPC are not necessarily the stalwart organizations that used to be big consumers of vector machines in decades gone by. When new companies think about HPC, they are more apt to think of big commercial Unix servers joined by high-speed switches into parallel supercomputers, or clusters of cheaper Intel-based machines running Linux. Many of these companies wouldn’t know a vector supercomputer if they tripped on it, and they might think that they are way out of their price range.
To try to stimulate some demand and to search the world out for new and interesting homegrown applications that play to the strengths of vector machines, the NEC High Performance Computing Europe subsidiary has created a try and buy program that will allow customers who present intriguing proposals to NEC to get a loaner deskside SX-6i supercomputer, which is more or less equivalent to a piece of Earth Simulator, to play around with for three months. The program, says Jorg Stadler, marketing manager at NEC HPCE, was established in Germany a few weeks ago and got rolling in the United Kingdom this week. These are the two biggest markets for HPC in general, with France and Italy being fairly big consumers of HPC technology as well. It seems likely that NEC HPCE will expand into these and possibly other European nations with a similar program if this one yields the stimulating results that the company expects.
The deskside NEC SX-6i is rated at 8 gigaflops, which is not much more powerful than a few Linux-based Intel servers clustered together when you are talking merely about raw theoretical number-crunching ability. However, a vector supercomputer – even a small one – is wickedly more efficient at handling workloads that do not exhibit the high degree of parallelism that is required for using Unix or Linux clusters, and in many cases, such a machine would be an equally good or better buy than such clusters. NEC is betting that if it lets potential customers play with the machines after being carefully screened to have workloads that are amenable to vector machines, it will be able to get them to take the machines on a permanent basis once customers have seen their merits. You can get an application for the try and buy program at www.hpce.nec.com.
The NEC SX-6i runs a variant of Unix called Super UX and can run applications written in C++ or Fortran. This machine is not, of course, the only gear that NEC has to sell. The company has a 32-way shared memory machine that runs Windows and Linux and that is based on the Itanium 2 processor from Intel that can run either HPC or general purpose computing workloads. This machine is sold as the NEC TX7 in Japan and as the NEC Express5800/1320Xc in the United States and Europe. It is also the machine that last week demonstrated TPC-C benchmarks running Windows operating systems and middleware that created above the 400,000 TPM level that, until now, only RISC/Unix machines could do. timpm@computerwire.com
Source: Computerwire
