Conclusions

The analysis of the data provided by the TOP500 report has led us to a number of conclusions concerning the state of HPC in the U.S. Some of these conclusions are:

• The U.S. is the clear world leader both as producer and as consumer of high performance computers.

• Both the U.S. and Japan seem to have mechanisms in place which restrict competition in favor of the local products.

• MPPs account for almost half of all installed supercomputers worldwide. Market penetration by MPPs in the U.S. is significantly higher, where MPPs constitute already now a majority of the installed supercomputers. A sizable portion of this market share can be attributed to government spending and the HPCC program.

• Microprocessor based machines have made significant inroads, and are the largest technology category in the U.S. This trend has been accelerated in 1994 through the introduction of processors such as the IBM R6000/590 and the SGI R8000 in parallel supercomputing systems.

Generally the TOP500 list has proven itself to be an extremely valuable tool for evaluating trends in the HPC market. Future releases of this report should enable the HPC community to track important developments much more accurately than in the past.