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The NEC TX-7 series.

Machine type Shared-memory SMP system.
Models TX-7 i9010, i9510.
Operating system Linux, HP-UX (HP's Unix variant).
Connection structure Crossbar.
Compilers Fortran 90, HPF, ANSI C, C++
Vendors information Web page http://www.hpce.nec.com/465.0.html
Year of introduction 2002.

System parameters:

Model i9010 i9510
Clock cycle 1.5 GHz 1.5 GHz
Theor. peak performance
Per Proc. (64 bits) 6 Gflop/s 6 Gflop/s
Maximal 96 Gflop/s 192 Gflop/s
Main memory ≤ 64 GB ≤ 128 GB
No. of processors 16 32

Remarks:

The TX-7 series is offered in 4 models of which we only discuss the 2 largest ones. The TX-7 is another of the Itanium 2-based servers (see also the Bull NovaScale, the SGI Altix3000, and the Unisys ES7000) which recently appeared on the market. The largest configuration presently offered is the TX-7/i9510 with 32 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 processors. NEC had already some experience with Itanium servers offering 16-processor Itanium 1 servers under the name AsuzA. So, the TX-7 systems can be seen as a second generation.

The processors are connected by a flat crossbar. NEC still sells its TX-7s with the choice of processors that Intel has: 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 GHz processors with L3 caches of 3--6 MB depending on the clock frequency (see the Itanium 2 for a full description).

Unlike the other vendors that employ the Itanium 2 processors, NEC offers its own compilers including an HPF compiler which is probably available for compatibility with the software for the NEC SX-6 because it is hardly useful on a shared-memory system like the TX-7. The software also includes MPI and OpenMP. Apart from Linux also HP-UX is offered as an Operating System which may be useful for migration of HP-developed applications to a TX-7.

Measured Performances:
In the spring of 2004 rather extensive benchmark experiments with the EuroBen Benchmark were performed on a 16-processor TX-7 i9010 with the 1.5 GHz variant of the processor. Using the EuroBen benchmark, the MPI version of a dense matrix-vector multiply was found to be 14.5 Gflop/s on 16 processors while both for solving a dense linear system of size N = 2,000 and a 1-D FFT of size N = 16,384 speeds of 3.8--4.1 Gflop/s are observed (see [40]).



next up previous contents
Next: The Quadrics Appemille. Up: Recount of (almost) available ... Previous: The NEC SX-6 series.

Aad van der Steen
Wed Oct 13 14:04:08 CEST 2004