NEC SX-6
Open-knowledge reference entry
The SX-6 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to eight vector processors, which share up to 64 GB of computer memory. The SX-6 processor is a single chip implementation containing a vector processor unit and a scalar processor fabricated in a 0.15 μm CMOS process with copper interconnects, whereas the SX-5 was a multi-chip implementation. The Earth Simulator is based on the SX-6 architecture.
The vector processor is made up of eight vector pipeline units each with seventy-two 256-word vector registers. The vector unit performs add/shift, multiply, divide and logical operations. The scalar unit is 64 bits wide and contains a 64 KB cache. The scalar unit can decode, issue and complete four instructions per clock cycle. Branch prediction and speculative execution is supported. A multi-node system is configured by interconnecting up to 128 single-node systems via a high-speed, low-latency IXS (Internode Crossbar Switch).
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This entry incorporates text from “NEC SX-6” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.