Supercomputers

Supercomputers are the ultimate engine of the information age. By generating and processing vast amounts of data with hitherto unparalleled speed, they make new activities in industrial research and product development possible. Supercomputers explores commercial supercomputer applications today as well as those emerging from university laboratories. It outlines trends in the supercomputing technology into the near future, and also contributes to a growing debate on the roles of the public and private sectors in nurturing this vital technology.

Please note this is a Short Discount publication. Thoroughly revised and updated, this year's report contains invaluable information investigating the impact of supercomputing technology on data processing in the near term and its influence for the next five years. The information and data in this report are critical in supplying: information on the size of each of the technical computing segments, what percentage of each is comprised of vector and parallel systems now, and what that percentage will be by 1995. For each technical computing segments, the report gives dollar volumes, units shipped, user industries, applications, operating system requirements, vector shares of market and installations. Find out which computing segments and vectors show the greatest promise for growth and profitability. The technical aspects influencing the development of supercomputing architectures and the features driving their user acceptance are analyzed. The report also provides immediate market opportunities by discussing types of applications that will benefit most from supercomputing technology.

Supercomputer technologies have evolved rapidly since the first commercial-based supercomputer, CRAY-1 was introduced in 1976. In early 1980's three Japanese super computers appeared, and Cray Research delivered the X-MP series. These machines including the later-announced CRAY-2 and NEC SX series created one generation of supercomputers, and the market was spread dramatically. The peak performance was higher than 1 GFLOPS and the compiler improvement was remarkable. There appeared many articles and books that described their architecture and their performance on The late 1980's saw a new generation of supercomputers. several benchmark problems. Following CRAY Y-MP and Hitachi S-820 delivered in 1988, NEC announced SX-3 and Fujitsu announced the VP2000 series in 1990. In addition, Cray Research announced the Y-MP C-90 late in 1991. The peak performance of these machines reached several to a few ten's GFLOPS. The hardware characteristics of these machines are known, but their practical performance has not been well documented so far. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is one of the important research fields that have been progressing with the growth of supercomputers. Today's fluid dynamic re search cannot be discussed without supercomputers and since CFD is one of the im portant users of supercomputers, future development of supercomputers has to take the requirements of CFD into account. There are many benchmark reports available today. However, they mostly use so called kernels. For fluid dynamics researchers, benchmark test on real fluid dynamic codes are necessary.