Düsseldorf and London, 1st December 2015 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced that NEC Deutschland GmbH was awarded the contract to provide an LX-series supercomputer, a state of the art high-performance-computing system to the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC) at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Once operational, this system will be the fastest Flemish supercomputer (Tier-1), and it will be ranked amongst the top 150 fastest supercomputers in the world. The infrastructure will cost 5.5 million Euro and it is financed by the Flemish Minister for Science and Innovation in Belgium.

Intensive computations for advanced research
The new supercomputer in Leuven will support research in areas such as renewable energy sources, and development of new materials or new medicines. The computer will enable researchers to, for example, compute more detailed climate models or research climate on other planets. For fundamental research, which is important on a medium term, the new system will also open new horizons.

NEC was selected through a public tender to supply and install the machine. The funding of the project is supported by the Hercules Foundation of the Flemish government under the authority of the Flemish Minister of Science and Innovation, Philippe Muyters. The supercomputer has been designed and will be operated by the VSC, a partnership of the five Flemish university associations.

One of the 150 fastest computers in the world
The supercomputer will have the computing power of 623 TFlop/s, the equivalent of 2,000 fast PCs, or three times the capacity of the first Flemish supercomputer, which is installed in Gent and is now about four years old. The supercomputer will utilize the newest generation of the Future Intel® Xeon® processor product family, while the 2400MHz memory, Mellanox EDR network interconnect and NEC GxFS storage capacity are also state of the art and capable of tackling the complex problems of scientific users. The new machine will be installed in mid-2016 at VSC KU Leuven and will be one of the 150 fastest listed supercomputers in the world.

Leading edge technology

• 623 Tflop/s peak performance
• 580 Nodes of the Future Intel® Xeon® processor product family
• Mellanox EDR 2:1
• 634 TB NEC GxFS file system
  • 20GB/s aggregated peak performance and +24 000 IOPS
• Water cooled racks for best optimized TCO
• NEC LXC3 cluster solution, NEC Docker, NEC IBViz monitoring tool.

“It is an honour for NEC to provide a new supercomputer for the research and engineering at the VSC KU Leuven. NEC’s basic strategy in the high-performance-computing business is to focus on the users and their needs, aiming to achieve high sustained performance, a key factor for NEC,” said Bruno Lecointe, Senior Sales Manager, Western Europe, NEC Deutschland GmbH. “NEC is closely cooperating with scientific users to understand the challenges they are facing and to address those challenges through our products.”

“The Flemish Government is committed to investing in research and innovation. Our research institutions are among the best in the world. We can only maintain and strengthen that top position if we keep investing,” said the Flemish Minister of Science and Innovation, Philippe Muyters.

“We were interested in not only buying a new state-of-the-art hardware system, but also offering to the Flemish research community a global solution that includes high quality software, training and consultancy services,” said Ingrid Barcena Roig, Tier 1 project leader at KU Leuven. “We are looking forward to starting our collaboration with NEC. NEC has lots of experience in building and managing high performance systems and we believe that their HPC expertise will help us to provide our users with an excellent machine that will boost their research to higher levels.”

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About VSC
The Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC) was established by the Flemish Government in December 2007 with the aim to join the efforts of the five Flemish universities to align and integrate their existing supercomputer infrastructures, to make their expertise available to public and private funded research and to develop a technical and financial plan for the construction of a competitive grid and HPC infrastructure available to all researchers in Flanders.

About KU Leuven
Situated in Belgium, KU Leuven has been a centre of learning for nearly six centuries. Founded in 1425, KU Leuven is one of the oldest and most renowned universities in Europe.  With more than 55000 students and 7000 researchers KU Leuven is a research-intensive, internationally oriented university that carries out both fundamental and applied research. It is strongly inter- and multidisciplinary in focus and strives for international excellence.

About NEC Deutschland GmbH
NEC Deutschland GmbH, formed in 1987 with its head office in Düsseldorf, Germany, is a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Europe Ltd. As a part of the globally operating NEC Corporation in Tokyo, Japan, NEC Deutschland is marketing innovative High-Tech-products, which result from a solid global R&D-background. Its product portfolio encompasses high-performance computing systems for scientific applications, complete solutions for data-management and –processing, telecommunication-systems and general IT-solutions, as well as biometric security solutions for enterprises and public institutions. NEC Deutschland is focusing on the realization of customized complete solutions which include superior services. Further information is available on the Internet at www.nec.com/de

About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company's experience and global resources, NEC's advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society.  For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.

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