NEC Corp and Control Data Corp duly came together in Tokyo this week to sign their memorandum of understanding intended to lead to Control Data taking up marketing NEC’s SX-3 supercomputers (CI No 1,833) – and the plan is to include Europe as well as the US. The agreement is due to be finalised by the end of January. Control Data will market the SX-3 under the NEC name, with NEC providing customers it signs with hardware, testing and maintenance support. NEC will train CDC engineers in marketing and technical support and CDC will act as total systems integrator, selling the supercomputers with its own hardware, initially aiming at the automotive and aerospace industries, where it can offer its own advanced manufacturing applications, three-dimensional graphics workstations and high-end Unix servers. NEC sought an agreement with CDC, which was a supercomputer pioneer and built its own supers until it ran out of money and closed down its ETA Systems business some three years ago, because of the difficulties it has found in winning supercomputer sales outside Japan on its own. Of the 20 SX-3s so far sold, 11 have been installed, but only five outside Japan three in Europe, one at the Meterological Office in Canada and one in the Houston Area Research Centre – but that one is owned by NEC’s HSNX Supercomputers subsidiary. A sixth foreign order comes from the Brazilian meteorological bureau. While NEC is counting on CDC to sell to US and European industry, it will itself continue to aim at the research and academic market,through its head office SuperComputer Marketing Promotion Division and organisations such as its European SX Technical Centre, established in January 1990 in Cologne Germany. It has no interest in the military market. The SX-3s run Unix System V.3.1. NEC and Control Data are both in the MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC camp – CDC helps design R-series parts as well as using them in its workstations and servers, NEC fabricates them in Japan, and the two hope to co-operate in other areas. CDC, with 1,800 machines in at 1,000 sites worldwide, can claim only four sites in Japan.
