NEC to sell the accelerator cards it puts into supercomputers for about $15k a pop
(2020/11/24)
- Reference: 1606193893
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/24/nec_vector_engine_standalone_sales/
- Source link:
NEC will soon sell the ‘Vector Engine’ PCIe accelerator cards it uses to power supercomputers as a standalone item.
The device is called the Vector Engine Processor and NEC suggests it as a fine way to handle tasks such as weather forecasting, climate modelling and fluid analysis.
NEC currently offers the Vector Engine in five of its own computers that range from a tower server to the eight-host <a href="https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/A511-64.html</a"> A511-64 Supercomputer.
The Japanese company will sell the Type20B, a 1600Hz beast with eight of its “Vector” cores. Each core can run 64 fully functional vector registers and features a "Last-Level-Cache" (LLC) that NEC says is the first of its kind and “has a ‘write-back’ policy, which means coherency between different cores, LLC and memory is always easily ensured.”
NEC insists its face-recog training dataset isn't biased, but refuses to share details of Neoface system with UK court [1]READ MORE
1.53TB/s memory bandwidth is the result and the company therefore advances the Vector architecture as especially good at memory parallelization, by autoparallelization or OpenMP. Message Passing Interface (MPI) can be used to parallelize across multiple different Vector Engines.
The Register ’s sibling site The Next Platform [2]took a deep dive into the architecture in 2017.
Now the company will sell the PCIe devices to other server-makers. Specialist integrators such as the USA’s Colfax International and Japan’ s ViSUAL TECHNOLOGY in Japan have signed up to sell the product as part of their own HPC offerings.
But NEC senior vice president Kazunori Sudo thinks there are customers to be had among smaller users.
“We have seen rapidly growing demand from SMEs for vector computing systems in the field of electromagnetic field analysis, computational chemistry and structural analysis for instance,” he said. NEC is therefore “identifying and developing partners” in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific to bring the cards to market.
Why integrators or buyers will be interested when GPU software ecosystems are burgeoning is unclear, but NEC clearly believes that its device’s grunt and smarts mean someone will find it a worthy investment. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/nec_neoface_watch_afr_locate_details_liberty/
[2] https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/22/deep-dive-necs-aurora-vector-engine/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The device is called the Vector Engine Processor and NEC suggests it as a fine way to handle tasks such as weather forecasting, climate modelling and fluid analysis.
NEC currently offers the Vector Engine in five of its own computers that range from a tower server to the eight-host <a href="https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/A511-64.html</a"> A511-64 Supercomputer.
The Japanese company will sell the Type20B, a 1600Hz beast with eight of its “Vector” cores. Each core can run 64 fully functional vector registers and features a "Last-Level-Cache" (LLC) that NEC says is the first of its kind and “has a ‘write-back’ policy, which means coherency between different cores, LLC and memory is always easily ensured.”
NEC insists its face-recog training dataset isn't biased, but refuses to share details of Neoface system with UK court [1]READ MORE
1.53TB/s memory bandwidth is the result and the company therefore advances the Vector architecture as especially good at memory parallelization, by autoparallelization or OpenMP. Message Passing Interface (MPI) can be used to parallelize across multiple different Vector Engines.
The Register ’s sibling site The Next Platform [2]took a deep dive into the architecture in 2017.
Now the company will sell the PCIe devices to other server-makers. Specialist integrators such as the USA’s Colfax International and Japan’ s ViSUAL TECHNOLOGY in Japan have signed up to sell the product as part of their own HPC offerings.
But NEC senior vice president Kazunori Sudo thinks there are customers to be had among smaller users.
“We have seen rapidly growing demand from SMEs for vector computing systems in the field of electromagnetic field analysis, computational chemistry and structural analysis for instance,” he said. NEC is therefore “identifying and developing partners” in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific to bring the cards to market.
Why integrators or buyers will be interested when GPU software ecosystems are burgeoning is unclear, but NEC clearly believes that its device’s grunt and smarts mean someone will find it a worthy investment. ®
Get our [3]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/nec_neoface_watch_afr_locate_details_liberty/
[2] https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/22/deep-dive-necs-aurora-vector-engine/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/