Architecture and Application: The Performance of the NEC SX-4 on the NCAR Benchmark Suite

In November 1994, the NEC Corporation announced the SX-4 supercomputer. It is the third in the SX series of supercomputers and is upward compatible from the SX-3R vector processor with enhancements for scalar processing, short vector processing, and parallel processing. In this paper we describe the architecture of the SX-4 which has an 8.0 ns clock cycle and a peak performance of 2 Gflops per processor. We also describe the composition of the NCAR Benchmark Suite, designed to evaluate the computers for use on climate modeling applications. Additionally, we contrast this benchmark suite with other benchmarks. Finally, we detail the scalability and performance of the SX-4/32 relative to the NCAR Benchmark Suite.