This report consists of nine articles. The first four articles present a detailed analysis of the high-performance computing situation as of November 1994. The next three articles focus on the hardware and software of the systems, which can be seen in the TOP500 . The final two articles are complete reprints of the two 1994 issues of the ``TOP500 Supercomputer Sites,'' which provide the basis of this report.
Meuer and Strohmaier analyze in the first article the general worldwide trends, which are revealed by the four releases of the TOP500 published in the past two years. They present the changes over time with respect to geography, manufacturers, applications, architectures, and technology. Simon presents an in-depth analysis of the U.S. situation of the field of high-performance computing. Jarp and Bez give an overview of the Japanese installations and Japanese vendors. Harms and Emmen discuss the European situation and provide a brief summary on computing in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Benelux nations. Van der Steen summarizes the architectures of the different systems in the TOP500 giving a concise description for each architecture. Dongarra and Hey present an overview of the Parkbench initiative, which is at present one of the most promising attempts to create a new standard benchmark for supercomputers. Geiger and Kroll collected for the first time a catalog of available software packages on high-performance systems. Based on this, they discuss the general situation of applications software in this field as well as ongoing porting activities such as EUROPORT.