The NEC SX-4 at HWW

Abstract

The NEC SX-4 which started production at Stuttgart on July 15th 1996, is jointly operated by university and industry in the framework of the HWW Betriebs GmbH. The major goal of HWW is to provide the users in academia and industry with the quality to solve larger problems, the capacity for better throughput and a broader diversity of usable architectures. The machine in Stuttgart is actually the only installed SX-4 equipped with 32 processors worldwide. In the Top 500 list of Summer 1996 [1], it is ranked as the most powerful system overall in Europe and the most powerful shared memory system worldwide. This article is a first description of the system and the HWW environment. It gives some performance numbers in comparison to the Cray C94D, which served Stuttgart University in the last years and makes some links to informations about how to access the system.