Thinking Machine Corporation (until its financial collapse) was the other American supercomputer company in addition to Cray that had the best penetration in Japan's TOP500 list. Eight installations are still represented, the most prominent being a brand-new CM5E/128 at the Angstrom Technology Partnership Lab. The installed systems are to be found mainly in the academic community and beyond the end of this list there are also smaller systems from TMC. Large Intel systems have been acquired by the National Aerospace Lab (XP/S25 with 330 processors), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and the Real World Computing Project (both with a XP/S5) and by Hiroshima University with a XP/4A system.
IBM, which had a low profile up until now as far as the Japanese TOP500 entries are concerned, has made a 'timid' come-back with one SP2-32 installed at the National Cancer Research Institute in Tokyo. In spite of its installed base of several hundreds IBM/3090 or ES/9000 systems, IBM Japan never had an equivalent to the EASI programme which ensured vector processor installations in many European installations. It now remains to see how well the large members of the SP2-family will be in Japan.
New on this year's list are also Convex, Parsytec, Silicon Graphics and MasPar. MasPar managed to get two of its systems included in the list of government sponsored systems that was acquired in the last fiscal year. One system went to the Institute of Agriobiological Resources in Tsukuba and the other was delivered to the National Cancer Research Institute. A GC Powerplus/128 was acquired by the Japan Institute for Advanced Technology and a 36-processor SGI Challenge was acquired by the Advanced Institute for Science in Ikoma City. Convex has placed a dual node (16 processor) system at OPU. Thanks to its collaboration with Nippon Steel (NKK) Convex has also several single node systems installed, but these are too small to be represented in the TOP500 list. Kendall Square Research (which also went bankrupt recently) is represented in Japan with two systems acquired through Canon's Supercomputer Division which grew out of the acquisition of the Japanese Floating Point System (FPS) subsidiary some years ago. One of the two systems was sold to the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) and the other one was used by Canon for benchmarking and system tests. Canon also markets Cray computers and operate a dual processor Y-MP/4E for the same purposes. nCUBE is no longer present in the Japanese portion of the TOP500 list .