The Contents

This report consists of ten articles. The first five articles present a detailed analysis of the high-performance computing situation as of November 1995. The next four articles focus on different aspects of the hardware and software of the systems, which can be seen in the <#37#>TOP500<#37#>\ . The final article is a complete reprint of the November 1995 issues of the ``<#38#>TOP500<#38#>\ Supercomputer Sites,'' which provides the basis of this report. Meuer and Strohmaier analyze in the first article the general worldwide trends, which are revealed by the six releases of the <#39#>TOP500<#39#>\ published in the past three years. They present the changes over time with respect to geography, manufacturers, applications, architectures, and technology. Dongarra and Simon present an in-depth analysis of the U.S.~situation of the field of high-performance computing. Hoffman and Schnepf give an overview of the Japanese installations and Japanese vendors and the differences to the overall market. Harms discusses the European situation and provide a brief summary on computing in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Benelux nations. Bez and Simon present a short description of the 25 centers with the highest accumulated performance installed. Van der Steen summarizes the new architectures of the different systems in the <#40#>TOP500<#40#> giving a concise description for each architecture. Dongarra and Walker present an overview of the new MPI standard, which is at present the most promising attempts to create a standardized programming environement for parallel computers with distributed memory. Nagel et al.~descibe in their article a new graphical interface for tracing, debugging and performance tuning for MPI. As a case study for Cluster computing Mierendorf, Schüller and Trottenberg present their results for running the IFS weather prediction model of the ECMWF on a cluster of four full blown C90s. For this work they were awarded the <#19#>SuParCup'95<#19#> at the <#20#>Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar '95<#20#>.