This paper provides a comprehensive performance evaluation of the NEC SX-8 system at the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart which has been in operation since July 2005. It provides a description of the installed hardware together with its performance for some synthetic benchmarks and five real world applications. All the applications achieved sustained Tflop/s performance. Additionally, the measurements presented show the ability of the system to solve not only large problems with a very high performance, but also medium sized problems with high efficiency using a large number of processors.