Supercomputers/Systems/AES NEC SX-3/44
Canada · operational · hpc
AES NEC SX-3/44
Also known as Canadian Meteorological Centre SX-3/44
Operated by Atmospheric Environment Service .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 20.0 GFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 22.0 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 90.9%
- Cores
- 4
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - NEC SX-3/44 | NEC | - | Reported | top500.orgecmwf.net |
| CPU | - NEC SX-3 vector processors, 4 CPUs, 343 MHz | NEC | 4 reported | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | - Multi-stage crossbar | NEC | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | NEC SUPER-UX Operating systems Unix (NEC SX-proprietary) · Proprietary SUPER-UX | NEC | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NEC SX-3/44 with four vector processors (343 MHz, multi-stage crossbar, SUPER-UX) at the Atmospheric Environment Service of Canada, Rmax 20 and Rpeak 22 GFlop/s, listed from June 1993 (rank 6, then the sixth fastest machine on the list) through June 1997 (rank 127) (https://www.top500.org/system/170812/). A 2004 presentation by the Canadian Meteorological Centre of the Meteorological Service of Canada on its high performance computing infrastructure charts the centre's supercomputing history from CDC and Cray machines through the NEC SX-3/44 and SX-3/44R, SX-4/16 and SX-4/80M3, SX-5/32M2 and SX-6/80M10 to the IBM p690 (https://ecmwf.net/sites/default/files/elibrary/2004/14125-msc-hpc-infrastructure-update.pdf); the chart carries no dates beyond its axis, which places the SX-3/44 around 1991 to 1992. TOP500 lists the machine's 1994 upgrade as an SX-3/44R at 23.2 GFlop/s (https://www.top500.org/system/170815/, rank 15 in November 1994 to rank 109 in June 1997), not modelled separately. A 1999 WMO progress report shows the centre then running SX-4/32, SX-4/16 and SX-5/16 systems. The purpose of this machine is inferred from the operator's weather-forecasting role, not stated in a fetched page.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-18 Added AES NEC SX-3/44 (aes-canada)
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.