leff@smu.UUCP (Laurence Leff) (01/16/88)
Summary of The Spang Robinson Report on Supercomputing and Parallel Processing
Volume 1 No. 3
Minisupercomputers, The Megaflop Boom (Lead Story)
There have been a total of 850 minicomputer systems installed since 1981.
(This article considers Floating Point Systems general purpose version of
array processor the first entrant to this market)
Possible new entrants to this race are Supertek (a Cray-compatible product),
Cydrome's Dataflow-based system, Quad Design (a spin-off from Vitesse and
still hunting for venture capital), Gould Computer Systems Division,
Celerity, Harris (rumors only), Digital Equipment (project in force but
no announcements as to exact nature). They estimate sales for this year
at between 275 million and 300 million.
50 percent of minisupers customers required DEC system compatibility.
10 percent required Cray compatibility while more buyers were concerned
with SUN compatability with Cray compatibility.
The Consortium for Supercomputer Research estimates a total
of 500 Cray-1 equivalent units by 1992 world-wide for academic research
and development. Seventy percent of all applications were migrated form
VAX-class machines, 12 percent from workstations, 10 percent from mainframes
and eight percent from Cray machines.
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Shorts; Cray Research has authorized to sell a X-MP14 to the Indian Minsitry
of Science and Technology
NEC announced the sale of single processor SX-2 to the Bangalor Science
Research center.
MASSCOMP received a large contract to sell its units to the government,
presumably the National Security Agency.
Three PhD's and a PhD candidate are part of Parasoft, a consulting company
specializing in software for hypercube architectures.
The Consortium for Supercomputer Research has released Volume II of
the series, "An Analysis and Forecast of International Supercomputing."
It concludes that supercomputer can cost its owner more than 50 million
dollars over the first five years not counting applications.
Encore Computer Corporation is using VMARK's PICK compatible applications
environment on its Multimax line.
Amdahl's 1400E now runs at 1700 MFLOPS and is thus the highest single
processor performance in the industry.
Ridge's new 5100 has 2MFLOP performance on the LINPACK benchmark and
14 million Whetstones per second.
MASSCOMP now runs 8 processors and thus is a 20 MIP machine.
Numerical Algorithms Corporation has released a version of its NAG
Fortran Library for the 3090 Vecctor facility.
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This issue also has a table of Superminicomputers listing various
information. Here are the number of installations:
Alliant 171
Celerity just shipping
Convex 200
ELXSI 80
FPS 365
Gould 6
Multiflow 5
Scientific 25
Computing
Supertek not shipping yet