NEC announced yesterday that its SX-9 supercomputer has achieved the world’s fastest standing in the high performance computing (HPC) field [JP] by getting top scores in 19 of 28 sections in the HPC Challenge Benchmark test.

The HPC Benchmark is generally accepted as a method of measuring and ranking the world’s supercomputers and consists of seven different tests encompassing 28 different areas. NEC’s SX-9 scored particularly well in memory bandwith for single CPUs and in parallel environments (8 areas) and in 5 areas of inter-process data transfer rate.

The computer (16 nodes) is currently in use at Tohoku University’s Cyber Science Center in Northern Japan. It features the world’s first CPU capable of a peak vector performance of 100 GFLOPS+.