Dr. Fischer told the audience that NEC never left the HPC market given the new successful SX-9 system installations in Europe at Météo France, DWD, CMCC, HLRS, and FZK.

NEC's goal is to deliver real application performance which means that it is not the end of supercomputing for NEC as a company.

The HLRS-NEC installation is a hybrid system with multi-physics and multi-scale applications consisting of a NEC SX-9 vector and a NEC LX-Cluster with a shared file system in a heterogeneous network.

NEC is also contributing to the PRACE project with new programming models and methods. The company is investigating typical application fields right now.

If we look at the trends in HPC, we see that SIMD is everywhere now, noted Dr. Fischer. Hybrid parallelization is increasingly showing up. The market needs hardware to address memory locality in applications. Many-core and two sockets usage is popular too.

However, it is clear that no single platform can optimally serve all needs which explains the diversity PRACE is looking for. NEC can offer hybrid SIMD systems which can work both as vector and scalar-like machines.

Future technology enhancements will see a slow growth in frequencies and perhaps a longer life-time. We need more memory bandwidth but it comes at a cost, warned Dr. Fischer. There is a need to use memory locality, mask registers, and search for gather/scatter to load or store.

Dr. Rudolf Fischer is enthusiastic about the vector register and told the audience that is really great.

NEC will develop future vector products and will provide a diversified product portfolio by taking care of

integrating scalar and vector product lines.

NEC is showing a growing market share in the scalar HPC market, concluded Dr. Fischer. More news is about to come in November 2009.