High Performance Computing (HPC) is a way to tackle complex mathematical, scientific or engineering problems. Alongside theory and experiment, computer-supported simulations of natural or technical processes have established themselves as a third pillar in the field of science and research. It is nowadays inconceivable that an aircraft manufacturer or a Formula One racing team would operate without using simulation software. Scientific calculations, such as in the field of astrophysics, medicine, pharmaceuticals or life sciences, depend on supercomputing to a very large extent.

NEC has a long history in High Performance Computing. Starting from the early 1980s, NEC has developed a product line of Vector Computers. With the rise of Linux based clusters NEC has provided complex solutions since the 1990s.

NEC will continue to innovate in this field with new solutions, in hardware, software and concepts. Now NEC can announce the next major milestone of its supercomputing strategy, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.

Overview

With the proprietary vector systems, a wealth of x86-based products including accelerators, and storage appliances, NEC provides complete solutions for all kinds of requirements. In addition NEC has the necessary skills to provide HPC services, from simple installation and customization to running the most complex heterogeneous systems in mission-critical operational environments, including code development and tuning consultancy by experienced analysts.

Our storage solutions range from an in-house developed global parallel filesystem (ScaTeFS) to file system appliances based on Lustre, GPFS, BeeGFS and other file systems. NEC also covers the full spectrum from high performance NVMe storage to multi-tiered storage solutions.
NEC works with different HPC network technology partners, building large clusters both with InfiniBand and Omni-Path technologies.

On the software side NEC develops compilers, libraries and MPI. We also provide our own cluster management suite, which we have developed from our longstanding experiences with large cluster installations. This whole suite of monitoring, administration and management functionality is constantly developed with the goal to enhance scalability even for the largest and most heterogeneous complex configurations.

HPC Knowhow

NEC not only provides hardware. We take pride in providing optimal solutions in HPC, based on the advanced skills of our experts.

Our System Integration and Support team is capable of operating the most complex environments for mission-critical production like weather forecasting. Such systems do not just consist of a supercomputer, but of a collection of huge complex networks, of databases with enormous capacity, of a large amount of servers managing the whole workflow, and only ultimately of the number crunchers themselves. Given the variety of options available to configure a customer-specific and optimized solution is by no means a trivial task.

NEC has a dedicated sales and pre-sales team with many years of experience in HPC. With an in-house development group for new HPC solutions, NEC can quickly adopt state-of-the-art technologies to fit the customers' needs.