A second look at the TOP500 in Europe shows the trend to parallel local memory systems, 89 installations (62%) and 274 Gflop/s (60%) compared to 54 shared-memory vector machines (38%) and 183 Gflop/s Rmax 40%). The traditional manufacturers have installed multiprocessor vector machines:Cray Research 40, SNI/Fujitsu 9, NEC 3, IBM 2 and Convex 1.
Who is using these computers in Europe? Most of the supercomputers are installed in research establishments or universities, research 54 (38% of Europe) and academic 49 (34%) computers with an Rmax of 226 (49%) and 149 Gflop/s (33%) respectively. The industry is not much interested in the extremely fast high-performance technology. Only 28 machines (5%) with a whole of 49 Gflop/s (11%) are available that means, industry use small machines. Compared to the world-wide situation Europe is leading. In the world a total of 246 Gflop/s (9%) is used by industry, the figures for USA/Canada are 134 Gflop/s (10%) and Japan 56 (8%). On the other hand the vendors keep a significant fraction of the whole performance in the other regions, Europe 12 Gflop/s (3%), USA/Canada 141 (10%) and Japan 84 (12%).
Beside geophysical companies the automotive industry is very good equipped mostly with Cray vector machines. Some chemistry companies have installed parallel systems. Quite different applications have the financial companies that now start with parallel systems. It is expected that this field will grow strongly and will open the vendors a new market.