Short History

NEC has been part of the HPC business for decades and is looking back upon some major installations in that field and is continuing to do so in the future.

As an example the famous Earth Simulator from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology must be named. Based on the SX-6 architecture it has shown a LINPACK benchmark of 35.86 TFlops. This performance made it the fastest supercomputer in the world from June 2002 - November 2004 (based on the  TOP500 list). 

In 2011 the TSUBAME 2.0 for the GSIC Center at the Tokio Institute of Technology saw another top 5 supercomputer in cooperation with HPE. In November 2010  the 4th rank was achieved with 1.192 PFLOPS. This performance could be extended to 2.843 PFlops with an update in  November 2013.

Present and Future

TSUBAME 2.5 still ranks at the top 100 (90th place as of 11/2019) but if you compare it to the current number one Supercomputer Fugakua (06/2020) it shows you how rapidly the overall average performance in the HPC sector has risen and will continue to do so in the future. The first supercomputer with over 1 TFlop (ASCI Red) was in 1997, the first over 1 PFlop (IBM Roadrunner) in 2008 and the first up to over 1 EFlop is planned for 2021 (planned for: 2021 Aurora with 1 EFlop for the Argonne Laboratory, 2021 Frontier 1.5 EFlops for the Oak Ridge Laboratory and 2023 El Capitan 2 EFlops for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory).

There are many other successful NEC HPC installations like at the  RWTH Aachen (CLAIX),  University of Mainz (Mogon II),  Institute for Molecular Science in Japan (Molecular Simulator), German Aerospace Center DLR (CARA) or Center for Computational Sciences at University of Tsukuba (Cygnus) the most recent installations should be shown in more detail on the following pages.