NEW BUILDING-BLOCKS FOR HPC IN 1995

In 1995 the field of High Performance Computing (HPC) faced a major mo ve of their building blocks - the computing nodes - away from propriet ary designs towards nodes built out of workstation boards. This moveme nt came along with the success of companies like Silicon Graphics and IBM, As the other companies acting in this field are also moving to CM OS as basic technology these two companies along with Convex/HP are bu ilding their HPC systems not only with CPUs but with boards ''off-the- shelf'' from successful workstation families. Major signs for the succ ess of this approach are not only the pure number of systems they can sell, but the percentage of systems they are able to sell to industria l users. We will discuss in this paper the different developments base d on the TOP500 lists of supercomputer sites available since June 1993 [1] and which, for the first time, provide a reliable base for a well -founded analysis of the highperformance computing field. Reports abou t the situation in 1993 and 1994 have been published before [2] and [3 ].