The big increase in the number of installed symmetrical multiprocessor workstations (SMP) in 1995 was the dominating effect with respect to computer architecture. Towards the end of this year there are first signs that SMPs have reached their climax, but this comes along with the presence of the first clusters of SMPs entering the list. Due to their distributed memory and the fact that they are no longer symmetrical we count them as massively parallel processor systems (MPP). The share of parallel vector processors (PVP) continued to decrease to only 21%, while the share of MPP systems rose to 53%. MPP systems are still the dominating class of systems in the TOP500.
Figure 6: The evolution of the architectures as it can
be seen in the TOP500.
In our first report [2] Japan was very much behind with the number of installed MPP systems in 1993. This began to change in 1994 [3]. The number of installed MPP systems in Japan is with 48% now only a little behind the world wide average of 53%. But like last year almost no SMP systems have been installed in Japan again.
Looking at the average performance of a system in the different classes for the different regions we see in Table 3 that the MPP systems installed in Japan are quite powerful. Especially the VPP500 systems from Fujitsu have a great impact here. This class of scalable parallel vector processors implemented in BICMOS (VPP500) or CMOS (NEC SX-4,VPP300) does not play an important part outside of Japan yet, but is already entering the European market.
in Gflop/s