NEC SX-9

{{Short description|Supercomputer built by NEC Corporation}}

{{More citations needed|date=April 2023}}

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The SX-9 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation. The SX-9 Series implements an SMP system in a compact node module and uses an enhanced version of the single chip vector processor that was introduced with the SX-6. The NEC SX-9 processors run at 3.2 GHz, with eight-way replicated vector pipes, each having two multiply units and two addition units; this results in a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS. For non-vectorized code, there is a scalar processor that runs at half the speed of the vector unit, i.e. 1.6 GHz. Up to 16 CPUs and 1 terabyte of memory may be used in a single node. Each node is packaged in an air-cooled cabinet, similar in size to a standard 42U computer rack. The SX-9 series ranges from the single-node SX-9/B system with 4 CPUs to the maximum expansion stage with 512 nodes, 8,192 CPUs, and 970 TFLOPS peak performance. There is up to 4 TB/s shared memory bandwidth per node and 2×128 GB/s node interconnect bandwidth. The operating system is NEC's SUPER-UX, a Unix-like OS.

The SX-9 had the world's fastest vector CPU core.{{Cite book|doi = 10.1109/IPDPS.2009.5161089|chapter = The world's fastest CPU and SMP node: Some performance results from the NEC SX-9|title = 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing|pages = 1–8|year = 2009|last1 = Zeiser|first1 = Thomas|last2 = Hager|first2 = Georg|last3 = Wellein|first3 = Gerhard|isbn = 978-1-4244-3751-1|s2cid = 8447987}}{{Cite web|url=http://insidehpc.com/2008/11/12/nec-sx-9-and-the-hpc-challenge-a-fairy-tale-story/|title = NEC SX-9 and the HPC Challenge: A Fairy Tale Story|date = 12 November 2008}} A fully equipped system with 512 nodes would have been the world's fastest supercomputer at the time of release in the first quarter of 2008, with a performance of 819 TFLOPS. The SX-9 was discontinued in 2015.{{Cite web|url=https://jpn.nec.com/hpc/sx9/|title = Sx-9: Hpcソリューション | Nec}}

The German national meteorological service (DWD) operated two independent SX-9 clusters, with 976 processors, 31,232 GB of RAM and 98 TFLOPS performance in total.{{Cite web |url=http://www.dwd.de/bvbw/generator/DWDWWW/Content/Presse/Pressekonferenzen/2009/PK__17__03__09/20090317__ZundF__Rechner,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/20090317_ZundF_Rechner.pdf |title=Archived copy |access-date=2010-10-15 |archive-date=2015-09-23 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150923230433/http://www.dwd.de/bvbw/generator/DWDWWW/Content/Presse/Pressekonferenzen/2009/PK__17__03__09/20090317__ZundF__Rechner,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/20090317_ZundF_Rechner.pdf |url-status=dead }}