NEC abandons Japan's 'next-gen' supercomputer

In tough times, you have to make tough decisions, and Japanese server maker NEC this morning announced in Tokyo that it was pulling out of the Next Generation Supercomputer Project sponsored by the Japanese government. The project involved NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi building a hybrid scalar/vector massively parallel system. NEC …

[Jim]

Shades of STRETCH

This smells like the IBM 7030. Sometimes project managers just try to reach too far. The 7030 was a beautiful design which had elements of every modern supercomputer but it was just too complex to get the clock up to speed and it was too costly to manufacture. Seymour ate their lunch with the simple CDC 6600. That translates to modern chip design. If you can't get the clock up to expectations you need to go back to the drawing board. I would say that applies to Itanium. Any CPU that needs that much cache and still can't break the sound barrier on clock rate as well as being delayed for so long doesn't smell of success.

I'm putting on my raincoat before the black rain falls.