1994 - A YEAR OF CHANGE

In 1994 the field of High Performance Computing (HPC) changed very muc h in many different aspects. Companies like Thinking Machines (TMC) - the former market leader in the field of MPP systems - and KSR - with one of the most innovative concepts for MPPs - went bankrupt while oth er companies like Silicon Graphics and IBM came out very strong. For t he first time MPP systems took over the lead over PVP systems and at t he same time we see a strong move towards CMOS technology. The trend t owards off-the-shelf processors is still holding on and a new trend to wards nodes, which are binary-compatible to workstation nodes, is comi ng up. In this paper we will discuss the different developments based on the TOP500 lists of supercomputer sites which have been available s ince June 1993 [1] and which, for the first time, provide a reliable b ase for a well-founded analysis of the high-performance computing fiel d.