NEC SX-9: fastest computer ever?

2007 1:02 pm

Everyone knows the fastest computer is IBM’s Blue Gene/L, right? Wrong, put that “genie” back in the bottle; NEC has a system that hits 839 TeraFLOPS. I’ll put it another way to give a better idea of what that means. 839 TeraFLOPS = 839,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Your average PC is capable of perhaps 5 or 6 Gflops (5,000,000,000), which makes NEC’s system 167,800 times faster (math is fun). Blue Gene/L is currently first on the list of fastest, with a paltry 280.6 GFLOPS.


NEC, a company perhaps best known for its mobile phones, is also a manufacturer of note in the field of super computers. SX-9, the latest in NEC’s line of super computers, follows the SX-8 model. NEC reckons it will be able to sell 700 of these systems during its life. There is some doubt as to where exactly the system will rank in the world league of super computers. SX-9 achieves a theoretical maximum peak performance of 839 TFLOPS, but that is not sustained performance.

If the performance of the SX-9 is sustained during “official” benchmarking, it will topple Blue Gene/L from the top of the list, and become the fastest computer ever. For now. You see, it’s a game of leapfrog. IBM and Sun are already working on systems to break the PetaFLOP (1,000 TFLOPS) barrier.

You can read more about the SX-9 at Eweek or at the International Herald Tribune.