NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA: ICM User's Guide
Last revision: 2023-10-27

0. About

The contents herein are based on a number of documents, as referenced
in the text, to provide a concise quick start guide and suggest
further reading material.

1. Introduction

NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA, anounced in 2017, is a vector processor (vector
engine, VE) belonging to the SX architecture line which has been
developed by NEC Corporation since mid-1980s [1]. Unlike its
stand-alone predecessors, TSUBASA has been designed as a PCIe card
working within and being operated by an x86 64 host server (vector
host, VH) running a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
The latter provides a complete software development environment for
the connected VEs and runs Vector Engine Operating System (VEOS)
which, in turn, serves as operating system to the VE programs. [2].

ICM UW supercomputer facility provides its users with a NEC SX-Aurora
TSUBASA installation as part of the Rysy cluster -- within the ve
partition:

Vector host (VH): Intel Xeon Gold 6126, 2x12 CPU cores, 192 GB RAM,
Vector engine (VE): NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA, 8x8 VPU cores, 8x48 GB RAM.

References:

[1] NEC SX Vector Supercomputer
    https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/index.html
[2] VEOS: Vector Engine Operating System
    https://github.com/veos-sxarr-NEC/veos