NEC Corp., effectively driven out of the American supercomputer market, has launched a remote computing service using its SX-4 supercomputer for overseas and domestic users.
NEC said April 15 the new service connects the supercomputer at its Fuchu Plant in Tokyo to the Internet and will enable research and development institutions and manufacturing firms that cannot obtain NEC's large-scale computers to conduct high-performance scientific analyses and simulations.
NEC's SX-4 model in Fuchu has 32 central processing units providing a maximum of 64 billion calculations per second and a main memory capacity of 8 gigabytes. The hourly rate for the new service is $100, or approximately 13,000 yen, per CPU, and special discounts are available for service contracts of 100 hours or more, the company said. Currently, NEC charges 2 million yen a month per CPU.