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*****For immediate use November 24, 2004
Canada's Ouranos Consortium Enforces Computing Power with Vector Supercomputer "SX-6"
NEC announced that it has received orders for two vector supercomputer systems of "SX-6/5A" (peak vector performance: 45 GFLOP/s - 45 billion floating-point operations per second, main memory capacity: 32 GB) from Ouranos Consortium (Montreal, Canada), through Cray, Inc. (James E. Rottsolk, President). In addition, the "SX-6/8A" (peak vector performance: 72 GFLOPS) will be added in February 2005.
Ouranos Consortium was established in 2002 to deal with problems brought about by the climate's changes in North America and to explore its related conditions. Cooperating with the government of Quebec, Hydro-Quebec (power/electric company), the Meteorological Service of Canada, and Valorisation-Recherche Quebec (VRQ: non-profit governmental organization which subsidizes research conducted by universities), it is staffed with more than a hundred scientists and experts in the area of meteorological phenomena.
Ouranos Consortium utilizes the supercomputer for a variety of purposes including; building a database on past climates, developing climate models of the Canadian region, researching climate simulation, generating medium to long term reference climate scenarios, predicting climate, and developing a statistical analysis method on climate changes. "SX-6" is expected to contribute to significant time reduction in climate modeling from 50 hours (on a scalar computing system) to 40 minutes.
Vector computing machines feature high CPU performance and high data transfer speed between memory and CPU, thus offering high sustained performance in large-scale computations. "SX-6" has achieved high sustained performance by employing state-of-the-art high performance DRAM and a high-speed memory network crossbar switch.
About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) (FTSE: 6701q.l) is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. Ranked as one of the world's top patent-producing companies, NEC delivers tailored solutions in the key fields of computer, networking and electron devices, by integrating its technical strengths in IT and Networks, and by providing advanced semiconductor solutions through NEC Electronics Corporation. The NEC Group employs more than 140,000 people worldwide and had net sales of 4,906 billion yen (approx. $47 billion) in the fiscal year ended March 2004. For additional information, please visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec.com.
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