High Performance Computing in Europe and USA: A Comparison

In the middle of the eighties one author of this paper1started to collect and publish statistics about the supercomputer market. At that time it was rather simple to decide which system qualified as supercomputer. The performance gap between vector system and regular mainframes was too large to leave any doubts. Beginning of the nineties this situation had gradually changed. A considerable number of companies competed in the HPC market with a large variety of architectures such as vector computer, mini vector computer, SIMD (Singel Instruction on Multiple Data) and MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) systems. A new definition was needed to decide which of these systems was a “supercomputer”. This definition needed to be architecture independent. Because of Moore’s Law this definition also had to be dynamic in nature to deal with the constant increase in computer performance.