"This partnership is an important step for NEC to promote a total solution business including heterogeneous or hybrid computing technologies", stated Mr. Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager of NEC's High performance computing marketing promotion division. "NEC will offer unique HPC solutions to our joint customers and will work with NVIDIA globally to specify Tesla solutions for customers designing high performance computing clusters."

"We are delighted to have an organization of NEC's caliber supporting the Tesla business",� stated 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."

The first customer to leverage this collaboration is the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, whose TSUBAME supercomputer has lead the supercomputing scene both in Japan and globally for the past 2.5 years. TSUBAME was upgraded in Oct 2008 with 680 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, unprecedentedly while the system remained in operation. The newly upgraded system recorded 77.48 Teraflops in Linpack, ranking it high in the global Top 500 supercomputer listing.