-3 The Japanese will undoubtedly continue to be well represented in the list of the most powerful computer installations in the world. With an increasing acceptance of supercomputing, both in academic circles and industry, a large number, probably as many as 30 new systems, can be expected, either as replacement of smaller systems or as brand-new installations. Massively parallel systems are in use in several places and with the growing maturity of the software for such systems, we can foresee that these systems will start replacing some of the traditional vector supercomputers. The Japanese vendors will expand beyond the early prototypes of their own MPP machines, such as Cenju-3 and AP-1000, but it is expected to take several years before they can offer commercial products that can compete effectively with the American vendors, such as Thinking Machine Corporation, Intel and others. IBM can also be expected to gain ground in the traditional supercomputing market with its SP1/SP2 parallel systems.
The major unknown factor could be the element of right-sizing. Although beyond the scope of this report, most of the Japanese manufacturers are now selling RISC-based workstations and servers, and combined with a strong presence of the main American RISC vendors, this is bound to influence the long-term computing scenario in Japan in a similar way to what has been seen in the Western countries.
Given that application availability is one of the prime requirements of the Japanese end users, the ratio of downsized system installations will depend on application partfolio, which is thought to favour the RISC-based systems.
In all cases, Japan as the economic giant it has now become, will surely not stand back when addressing the computing needs of its industries, research centres and academic communities.
[figure96]
[figure101]
[figure107]
[figure112]
jap