Supercomputers/Systems/Osaka University SX-4
Japan · operational · hpc
Osaka University SX-4
Also known as Osaka University Computation Center SX-4/64M2
Operated by Osaka University .
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
- 61.7 GFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 64.0 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 96.4%
- Cores
- 64
- 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-4/64M2 (TOP500 entry SX-4/32) | NEC | - | Reported | top500.orgir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp |
| CPU | - NEC SX-4 vector processors, 64 CPUs in total | NEC | 64 reported | Reported | ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jptop500.org |
| Interconnect | - Multi-stage crossbar | NEC | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NEC SX-4 at Osaka University. TOP500 lists it as SX-4/32 (32 processors at 250 MHz, Rmax 61.7 and Rpeak 64 GFlop/s on the system page, 60.6 in both appearances) at rank 19 in November 1996 and rank 41 in June 1997 (https://www.top500.org/system/170851/). The university's Computation Center News No. 103 (January 1997) is a special issue on the new supercomputer, an SX-4/64M2 that started operation in the new year with 64 CPUs, 128 GFlop/s of vector performance, 16 GB of main memory, 32 GB of extended memory and 1.3 TB of disk, about 20 times the throughput of the previous SX-3/14R (https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/66189/oksn_103_001.pdf); the director notes that preparation began in fiscal 1994. The SX-4/64M2 is two 32-CPU nodes, so the 32-core TOP500 entry is read here as one node of that machine; this matching is an inference, since TOP500 does not mention the model name, and the flops figures describe the 32-CPU run while the core count is that of the full system. The predecessor SX-3/14R at the same university appears in TOP500 at rank 34 in June 1993 (https://www.top500.org/system/170792/). The later Osaka machine is osaka-sx5-128m8. TOP500 gives EWS-UX/V as the operating system, which is the SX-4 front-end environment rather than SUPER-UX, so no OS edge is recorded.
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 Osaka University SX-4 (osaka-university)
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.