TOP500 Report 1996

1996 was again a year full of changes for the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. The shake out of vendors culminated in Silicon Graphics (SGI) buying Cray Research. A few month later died the father of "Supercomputing " Seymour Cray after a car accident. New systems like 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 version of Hitachi's SR2201 massively parallel (MPP) system with 2048 processors. However the most important change took place behind the title-pages of newspapers and was not easy to follow. During this year the industrial usage of HPC systems in general and of MPP systems specifically gained a lot of momentum. The U.S. is leading this trend very strongly with already 38% of all systems installed at commercial customers. Many of these system are used for non traditional applications in finance or for data mining. We will discuss in this paper the different developments based ..