The Cybermedia Center (CMC) at Osaka University has purchased 20 SX-8R vector supercomputers from the NEC Corporation. The new system has a peak performance of 5.3 TFLOPS and will be the largest SX series system acquired in Japan.
CMC plans to add a next-generation SX system in two years, whose peak performance is expected to exceed 20 TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second), a performance enhancement of 16 times that of the current system of SX-5/12M8 (peak performance: 1,280GFLOPS).
The Cybermedia Center at Osaka University was established in April 2000 and is a joint product of the former Computing Center (CC) and related departments of Osaka University. The center has continually deployed computing systems of the highest levels and provided computational resources for large and high-speed calculations to researchers in a wide range of areas across Japan, resulting in significant achievements in large-scale simulations in multiple and varied fields.
NEC launched sale of the world's fastest commercial vector supercomputer SX-8R in October 2006. The SX-8R boasts a peak vector performance of 144 TFLOPS and demonstrates high performance in the areas of automotive performance, weather forecasts and environment simulations, where large-scale, large-capacity data calculations are required.
Geoscience measuring networks have gaps, for where there is no electricity, no data can be collected. Many remote regions are still white spots on the data landscape. A new energy system will soon remedy the problem.
Weather forecasts, disaster warnings, traffic reports – no-one today is willing to go without up-to-the-minute information. Residents want to find out how high a flood will rise, scientists track the development of earthquakes, and investors call for wind data from the site of a projected wind farm. All of these data can only be determined if a close-meshed network of automatically operating measuring stations is in place. But the network is patchy, for in many places there is no power to operate the equipment. In places where no power cables have been laid, the measuring stations have to operate self-sufficiently. At present, the necessary electricity usually comes from solar cells, but these are not always able to meet the energy requirements. Especially in winter, when the modules are covered with snow and ice and additional energy is needed to heat the sensors, the sun’s energy is not sufficient. Sometimes it is simply too expensive to generate electricity using photovoltaics alone.
A Delta IV evolved expendable launch vehicle carrying a Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite was launched from the Space Launch Complex-6 here Nov. 4 at 5:53 a.m.
"I'm extremely proud of the precision with which the base and Vandenberg launch team planned and executed this Delta IV mission," said Col. Terry Djuric, the 30th Space Wing vice commander. "This west coast launch helped kick off the Air Force's yearlong 60th anniversary celebration."
Today, the vision of quieter and more environmentally friendly flying came a step closer as researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) unveiled their revolutionary concept for a silent aircraft.
Originally conceived as making a huge reduction in the noise experienced by people in the vicinity of airports, this highly-efficient design also offers improvements of around 25% in the fuel consumed in a typical flight compared to current aircraft.