New version will offer 13 percent performance jump at a lower rental price TOKYO — NEC Corp. will launch in October a new version of its SX-6 supercomputer that boasts a 13 percent performance increase on the original model and has a lower monthly rental price, the company said Thursday.The new SX-6, the first major upgrade to the computer since it was launched in late 2001, achieves its performance jump though the use of faster processors, said Diane Foley, a spokeswoman for Tokyo-based NEC. The company won’t disclose the clock speed of the chips, which are developed by NEC for use in its supercomputers.The faster processors mean a single node can achieve a peak vector performance of 72 billion floating point operations per second (G FLOPS) on a theoretical peak performance of 93.3G FLOPS, the company said in a statement. Memory capacity has also been increased and is now double that of the original SX-6 at 128GB on a single node.NEC said it has received over 230 orders for the SX-6 since it was first launched in late 2001. Users include those in the meteorology, aerospace and automotive industries, it said.The improved SX-6 will be available worldwide in October and has a monthly rental price starting at ¥2.4 million ($20,690). Software DevelopmentTechnology IndustrySmall and Medium Business