NEC to sell the accelerator cards it puts into supercomputers – for about $11,000 a pop

NEC will soon sell as a standalone item the PCIe accelerator cards it uses to power modest supercomputers. The device is built around the tech giant's custom Vector Engine Processor, and NEC suggests it as a fine way to handle tasks such as weather forecasting, climate modelling, and fluid analysis. NEC offers the chipset in …

[redpawn]

It's not a video card,

but how many frames per second playing Doom?

[A Non e-mouse]

Why integrators or buyers will be interested when GPU software ecosystems are burgeoning is unclear

Throwing away $20k on a failled experiement is cheaper than six or seven figure sums for a low end supercomputer so maybe NEC see it as a gateway drug to their supercomputer ecosystem.

[AMBxx]

I want one

I just don't know what I'd do with it!

[Zebo-the-Fat]

Pi??

Can I add it to my raspberry pie??

[hammarbtyp]

Re: Pi??

Might make a bit crunchy

[K]

Re: Pi??

Most stupid and funny comment of the day... take my upvote

[Tom 7]

Re: Pi??

You can add a PCIe bus to a Pi but you need to solder stuff the the main board.

[jason_derp]

Re: Pi??

"You can add a PCIe bus to a Pi but you need to solder stuff the the main board."

Thank you for your serious reply. Although knowing this will require soldering, I find the project a little more intimidating than before when I thought I was just buying a $15k card.

[KSM-AZ]

Go for the Pine64? was: Pi??

RockPro64 has a 4? lane PCIE. Similar money. Just upconvert to a 16 lane with an adapter. A roll of duct tape. The NEC card can't burn more than 500 or so watts, so you'll need an interesting power arrangement. Does someone make an active pcie backplane with an ATX power plug? Does this beast have a seperate power inpuf?

[Tom 7]

2.45 TFLOPS for $15000

or 4 TOPS for $60 for a Coral. OK apples and oranges but seems to be some disparity.

Come to think of it the GPU on the pi Zero is 24Gflops so 100 of them (<$1000)

[John Savard]

Exciting

Oh, are these the SX-Aurora TSUBASA processors? Glad to know it's finally possible to buy one... of course, you would need at least a Threadripper, so you could also have a video card at the same time.

[stiine]

You know Apple will offer them

You will soon be able to spend $50k on a PC.

[jason_derp]

Re: You know Apple will offer them

"You will soon be able to spend $50k on a PC."

And it'll still run like crap.

[AMBxx]

Re: You know Apple will offer them

How much extra for the wheels?

[Rich 2]

So how does this compare to the nVidia offerings? The Reg article the other day said the latest nVidia thing was rather at 19 TFLOPs - is it hugely more expensive?

[Boris the Cockroach]

Will it play crysis?

Actually, will the bit miners buy them and stop hogging all the high end GFX cards?

[John Savard]

Cost per TFlop

AMD's new MI100 Instinct accelerator card offers 11.5 Teraflops of 64-bit double-precision floating-point oomph, and is probably somewhat less expensive than the NEC card with only 2.45 Teraflops, but still in the same ballpark.

But the NEC card does have an important advantage. Accelerator cards are designed like GPUs, and so they can only perform a fairly restricted type of calculations.

The NEC card, on the other hand, is architecturally similar to the Cray I computer and similar vector supercomputers. As a result, a larger fraction of a typical calculation can take advantage of those 2.45 Teraflops of vector power. As well, it isn't an accelerator card - it's a self-contained computer, and so the scalar parts of the calculation are also performed within the card, so delays in moving data in or out of the card do not take place during a calculation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cost per TFlop

NEC has been building systems to do this since before 1988...and they were VERY expensive...

[ProDigit]

Re: Cost per TFlop

Look up xeon phi.

10yr old technology doing the same.

Basically like 16 to 128 x86 Atom processors on a card.

[89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921]

Is it profitable for Bitcoin mining?

[YetAnotherJoeBlow]

Interconnects

It is the interconnects that is the secret sauce and co$t - if you can not pipe data in and out at speed from each at all times, they are not worth the cost.

[89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921]

The ASRock H81 PRO BTC takes 6 PCIe cards.. Hell, that's a lot of Teraflops in a desktop case.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H81%20Pro%20BTC%20R2.0/

(only one PCIe 2.0 x16; bottlenecks etc.)

[ProDigit]

That's the dumbest thing ever,

Especially since you can get Intel Xeon Phi cards for like $200-300 online nowadays, and that's like nearly a decade old technology!

It also makes no sense knowing one can just buy mini Threadripper or Epyc server blades, or systems.

Not to mention, GPUs like Nvidia RTX 3090 is running +20x faster, for an 8x lower price.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like GPU are good at some things and not at others, vectors are better at some things, including those that GPU are not good at. Horses for courses and it's certainly nothing like a Phi.

HPC and certain workloads are not only about TFLOPS and they certainly don't burn 500W, but that would only require a cursory glance (via your favourite search engine) to see that:

https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/vector_engine.html?