NEC Corp’s new four-model family of scientific supercomputers, announced last month (CI No 833), is claimed to offer 40% better price-performance than the previous generation: the SX2A, SX1A, SX1EA, and SXJA range in performance from 250 MFLOPS to 1.3 GFLOPS, and a new clustering feature is claimed to enable a complex of four machines to deliver up to 5.3 GFLOPS at peak, and the company says that arithmetic processor performance is up 19% on the predecessor, while the control processor is 90% more powerful; maximum main memory is quadrupled to 1Gb, and the channels are claimed to transfer data to and from disk at 20Mbytes-per-second; the machines run NEC’s SX-UX implementation of Unix and support TCP/IP communications for co-existence with other Unix systems; shipments in Japan start in June and the new machines rent for $220,472 to $504,000 a month; the new machines will be offered in North America by the Honeywell-NEC Supercomputers 50-50 joint venture marketing company in due course.
