The SX-Aurora Vector Engine Programming Environment

Dr. Erich Focht (NEC Deutschland GmbH)

2022, November 15th

The SX-Aurora Vector Engine (VE) is an accelerator in PCI card format with very large memory bandwidth (1.53TB/s). Unlike GPUs it is built with very few powerful cores using long vector registers of 256 double precision words and a combination of SIMD + pipelining for fine grain parallelization.

The talk introduces the hardware details of the vector processor, explains the system architecture and system software environment of VE applications and dives into various programming paradigms like native VE programming, hybrid programming APIs, hybrid MPI, using Python and machine learning frameworks.