1996 - THE INDUSTRIAL USAGE OF HPC SYSTEMS TAKES OFF

1996 was again a year full of changes for the High Performance Computi ng (HPC) community. The shake out of vendors culminated in Silicon Gra phics (SGI) buying Gray Research. A few month later died the father of ''Supercomputing'' Seymour Gray after a car accident. New systems lik e the T3E entered the market place quite impressive and there is a new number one on the TOP500. It is again a Japanese system, a special ve rsion of Hitachi's SR2201 massively parallel (MPP) system with 2048 pr ocessors. However the most important change took place behind the titl e-pages of newspapers and was not easy to follow. During this year the industrial usage of HPC systems in general and of MPP systems specifi cally gained a lot of momentum. The U.S. is leading this trend very st rongly with already 38% of all systems installed at commercial custome rs. Many of these system are used for non traditional applications in finance or for data mining. We will discuss in this paper the differen t developments based on the TOP500 lists of supercomputer sites availa ble since June 1993 [1] and which, for the first time, provide a relia ble base for a well-founded analysis of the high-performance computing field. Reports about the situation in previous years have been publis hed before [2,3,4].