In the Benelux, two of the old supercomputer companies still hold a position: NEC and Cray, with each one machine. The manufacturers with new machines are newcomer SGI and IBM. IBM was successful in the technical scientific market and in the commercial market. SGI sells well at universities and research institutes.
The stable centres that have been in the list for over a year, are the two large traditional supercomputer centres NLR and SARA. A number of other centres get their machines in the list when they buy them and then leave with six or 12 months. At the universities, SGI is rather successful. It takes over this position from Convex. There is no large parallel machine installed yet in the Netherlands. The national science foundation favours a few machines of different architecture above a big central facility. The coming years, the Dutch government will supply additional funds for HPCN specially focused on industrial and commercial applications.
The installed Rmax performance is 4% of that in Europe. Belgium is still lagging behind the other small European industrialised countries with 0.6% of the European power installed. Only the brand new SP/2 at Leuven made it to the list.