The NEC SX-8 Vector Supercomputer System

In 2003, the High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart (HLRS) has decided to install 72 NEC SX-8 vector computer nodes with 576 CPUs in total. With this installation, the HLRS is able to provide the highest vector technology based computational power to academic and industrial users within Europe. In this article, an overview of the NEC SX-8 vector computer architecture is presented. After a general outline of the SX-8 series, a description of the SX-8 hardware is given. The article is finalized by an overview of related software features