The vector parallel architecture has already a high market impact in Japan. While the number of installed vector parallel systems listed in the report is still small, the six VPP500 systems listed account for a significant fraction of the overall supercomputer power in Japan. In figure 1 the Rmax performance of different technologies employed in the 82 Japanese TOP500 entries is compared. The vector parallel architecture accounts for 310 Gflop/s out of a total of 709 Gflop/s (44%). Traditional ECL based vector multiprocessors still contribute 334 Gflop/s, which is a fraction of 47%, but with a strongly decreasing trend. MPP systems on the basis of workstation processors only represent a fraction of 33 Gflop/s (5%) of the total Rmax performance installed in Japan and MPP systems based on other proprietary processors amount to 32 Gflop/s (4%). The Japanese supercomputer market ist therefore significantly different from other markets and vector processing continues to play a very strong role.
Figure 1: Performance of different technologies employed in the Japanese TOP500 entries.
Fujitsu states that they have by now installed about 300 processors in 14 VPP500 systems, mainly in Japan. This number excludes the NAL system. New additions on the TOP500 list in prominent positions are a 30-processor system at the Angstrom Technology Partnership Lab in Tsukuba, a 30-processor system at the University of Tsukuba and a 28-processor system at RIKEN in Tokyo. Several others systems are planned for installation. At KEK in Tsukuba a 80-processor system will be installed in January 1995.
Also in 1995 we expect the first installations of the SX-4 series, at the very least some NEC internal systems. It seems therefore safe to predict that the vector parallel architecture will be very soon the dominating architecture in Japan in terms of performance delivered.