HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING IN THE US IN 1996 - AN ANALYSIS ON THE BASIS OF THE TOP500 LIST

In 1993 for the first time a hst of the top 500 supercomputer sites wo rldwide has been made available, The TOP500 list allows a much more de tailed and well founded analysis of the state of high performance comp uting, Previously data such as the number and geographical distributio n of supercomputer installations were difficult to obtain, and only a few analysts undertook the effort to track the press releases by dozen s of vendors, With the TOP500 report now generally and easily availabl e it is possible to present an analysis of the state of High Performan ce Computing (HPC) in the U,S, This note summarizes some of the most i mportant observations about HPC in the U.S. as of late 1996, The major trends we document here are the continued dominance of the world mark et in HPC by the U.S., the completion of a technology transition to co mmodity microprocessor based highly parallel systems, and the increase d industrial use of supercomputers in areas previously no represented on the TOP500 list.