DEVELOPMENTS IN JAPAN

The supercomputer situation in Japan is characterized by the installat ion of many supercomputers of the new CMOS based generation. Fujitsu e ntered the list with new VPP300 and VPP700 installations, while NEC co ntinued to install more SX-4 systems. Finally, Hitachi succeeded to de liver the currently most powerful system in the world to the Universit y of Tsukuba with the CP-PACS computer. Following the former leader NW T, again a system is leading the list that has been developed in a col laboration between computer industry and a research institute. With th ese new systems Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC increased their competitivene ss by advanced CMOS technology together with an attractive price/perfo rmance ratio. This also resulted in the success of winning several pro curements outside of Japan. The market distribution in Japan became so mewhat more balanced compared to 1995 when Fujitsu was leading far ahe ad. In terms of performance Hitachi (774.5 Gflop/s) now became second behind Fujitsu (910.5 Gflop/s) while in terms of number of sites NEC ( 15) is second behind Fujitsu (21). IBM also progessed well increasing its number of sites from 8 to 13. Gray kept its 10 sites but lost part of its performance share relative to the other vendors. SGI's success in Japan is again not visible in the TOP500. Only 3 Japanese sites en tered the list. Most SGI systems are smaller in size. Japan increased its share of the TOP500 sites from 73 to 80 entries which corresponds to 16%. Traditionally, the Japanese supercomputer sites are in average more powerful than the sites in other countries. Consequently, 21 Jap anese sites are listed in the world-wide top 50. Japan's share in the world-wide installed R-max Gflop/s capacity increased even more. The a ggregate performance of the Japanese TOP500 sites doubled from 1,234 G flop/s to 2,508 Gflop/s which corresponds to 31.4%. In summary, Japan strengthened its position world-wide as the second largest user of sup ercomputers. The three most powerful systems of the world are installe d in Japan!