And the Winner Is….

altI guess you can say there’s a competition for just about everything in the world.  Hot dog eating, wife carrying, ugliest dog and fastest computing.  Although NEC hasn’t won a best beard contest in a while we just won first place at the HPC Challenge with our Earth Simulator. 

Our “Earth Simulator” you ask? 

Allow me to give you the technical answer: The Earth Simulator is a parallel vector computing system that was launched in March 2002 at JAMSTEC. The renewed Earth Simulator, put into operational use in March 2009, consists of 160 nodes of the SX-9/E system with a theoretical peak performance of 131TFLOPS, which also boasts the world fastest CPU core of 102.4GFLOPS.

Now allow me to translate: A really fast computer that would probably be a killer gaming PC.

 Press Release

 HPC Challenge Website

Lock the Door and “Don’t Come Out Until You Have Something”

What do you get when you put two really smart people in a room together and tell them to “do something really cool?”  Hopefully a new supercomputer…or at least a new gaming console.

NEC has had a great presence in the supercomputing world for some time now.  They have won multiple speed and performance contests over the years.

Intel…well, do I really need to say anything more?

NEC and Intel have decided to lock themselves in a room and develop new supercomputer technologies that, I’m sure, will blow our minds.  Fancy terms like “vector pipeline management, memory sub-systems and high speed interconnect technology” have been thrown around as being the keys to a successful project.

We just need to make sure we don’t let them create a real life Terminator.  The last thing we need is Arnold taking over the world.

Press Release