The current incarnation of NEC vector machines debuted as the Aurora Vector Engines, used in the Tsubasa line of machines, in October 2017. 2023 the situation is that there are upcoming products this year that will match them whereas their plan I believe was for 2026/27.” Similar thing happened when they pulled out of K computer R&D in 2009 as a consequence of the Lehman shock, but SX survived as GPUs & HBM tech were still nascent. At 6.8 TB/sec mem BW target, MI300 would have buried them already in 2023… Not just MI300 but also the improved version of H100 w/Grace. “This could be the final nail in the coffin for their SX vector processors history. “Buried in GTC/GTP excitement, NEC announces ceasing R&D of their next gen accelerator aiming to be 10x improvement in power efficiency, citing that commercial accelerators will match their objectives,” Matsuoka said in a tweet. Aside from driving the design and installation of several generations of TSUBAME supercomputers at TiTech, Matsuoka spearheaded the development and installation of the 537 petaflops “Fugaku” supercomputer based on Fujitsu’s A64FX vector-enhanced multicore Arm processor. The only reason we bring this up at all is that Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Lab in Japan and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, made some comments on Twitter suggesting that NEC was sunsetting the successor to the venerable SX line of vector machines that dates back to 1983. We had reached out to NEC for comment and had not heard back as yet when this story ran, but we have added the comment to the bottom of this story. If this turns out to be true, this would mark the end of the vector supercomputer era that Seymour Cray started way back in 1964 with the Control Data Corp 6600. Updated: There is some chatter – some might call it well-informed speculation – going on out there on the Intertubes that Japanese system maker NEC is shutting down its “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor business.
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