NEC announced today a sales partnership with NVIDIA Corporation to sell NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing solutions.

The partnership enables NEC to integrate NVIDIA GPUs into its systems and offer a variety of related solutions to end customers. One of the most recent trends in the HPC market is to enhance application performance by harnessing the massively parallel processing power of the GPU. NVIDIA, with its significant achievements in the GPU market, views the HPC market as one of its major growth areas. NVIDIA‘s business model is to provide NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing solutions to end users through sales partners, and to allow the partners to build specialized systems. NEC’s presence as a major solution provider in the HPC market, especially in the high end academic market, has lead to this sales partnership.

In order to best utilize GPU computing, it is important to understand the characteristics of the application, together with optimization techniques. NEC, through its extensive experience providing application solutions, possesses the expertise to best utilize GPU computing and provide superior solutions to end customers. Furthermore, acquiring and accumulating the knowhow to utilize GPU computing is expected to generate greater business opportunities for NEC’s scalar solutions business.

One of the first customers to directly benefit from this collaboration is the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, whose TSUBAME supercomputer has been an international leader for the past 2.5 years. TSUBAME was significantly upgraded in October 2008 with 170 NVIDIA Tesla S1070 GPU Systems, while the system continuously remained in operation. The newly upgraded system recorded 77.48 Teraflops in Linpack, ranking it favorably in the global Top 500 supercomputer listing.

“This partnership is an important step for NEC to promote its total solutions business including vector and scalar technologies,” said Mr. Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager of NEC’s high performance computing marketing promotion division. “By continuing its vector business and advancing scalar business NEC will be able to offer unique HPC solutions including hybrid (vector-scalar) systems.”

“We are delighted to have an organization of NEC’s caliber supporting the Tesla business,” said Andy Keane, general manager of the GPU computing business at NVIDIA. “Their industry and segment experience will deliver enormous value to our joint customers and will help to deliver truly transformative results to the work they are doing.”

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