The United Kingdom (UK) played a major role in the scientific computing field. Since the early days fast machines are used like CDC 6600 or CDC 7600. The first Cray 1 in Europe was installed at ECWMF that from that time on always bought the most powerful machine from Cray Research. So it became the leading centre in Europe. As ECWMF belongs to a European organisation, funded by 18 countries, it cannot directly be included. In 1994 it has been overtaken by the University of Edinburgh.
In this list UK broadened its base and performance and became number 2 in Europe. The number of installations grew from 20 in 1993 to 25 in the 1994 list. The Rmax -performance was increased by a factor of 2.7, from 42 Gflop/s to 114 Gflop/s. The reason was a massively upgrade or new Crays for the first 6 institutions: a Cray T3D 256 for Edinburgh, a C916/16 and a T3D 128 for ECWMF, a C916/16 for the UK Meteorological office, a C916/16 for the Government and a Meiko CS-2/32. That means 82 Gflop/s (72% of UK) of the total performance is represented by these 6 computer centres.
With these great investments five British centres entered the TOP100 . It is remarkable that in 1994 beside the above mentioned centres nine new computers have been delivered. That means in total 13 computers from 20 are brand newas we have to subtract the ECWMF C916 which has been upgraded in the size of memory in 1994 but not in performance. These 13 computers represent an Rmax of 82 Gflop/s (72% of UK).
A short look at the application areas, these differ from Germany and others: Academic 6 computers with a performance of 33 Gflop/s (29%), Research 6 computers 46 Gflop/s (40%), Classified 4 computers 20 Gflop/s (18%), Industry 6 computers 11 Gflop/s (10%) and Vendors 3 computers 5 Gflop/s (4%). In UK the classified computer centres take a great fraction of the total machines. For comparing the average speed in the different application areas, here are the factors: 5.5 Gflop/s in Academic, 7.7 in Research, 1.8 in Industry. It is important to stress the fact that 40 Gflop/s (35% of total UK) of Research belong to the Weather, in this case the centres in Reading and Bracknell have an average of 13.3 Gflop/s each. A similar behaviour is to be seen in industry, 8 Gflop/s are concentrated on 4 machines in geophysical applications. Only chemistry and aerospace are the other industrial fields, the British automotive industry is missing in this TOP500 list.
In UK Cray is the absolute market leader with 10 systems and an Rmax performance of 87 Gflop/s (76%), the rest is shared by 9 vendors. Nearly every vendor is represented in UK, Intel 3 systems, SGI 3, KSR 2, Meiko 2, the others only one machine.
In UK the base of parallel systems have been broadened, 16 machines can be grouped as parallel distributed memory systems, only 9 belong to the traditional parallel vector processors.
Meiko as a British vendor is represented by four computers in the TOP500 list, a very big system, 128 processors, have been sold to Lawrence Livermore Lab in the US.