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#>.