At first, we look at the government market in Japan. The most significant boost for supercomputing happened in the Japanese fiscal year '93 (ending March '94). In that year the government used a supplementary budget to stimulate the economy which resulted in 11 additional supercomputer sites beside the traditional university and research lab centres. In the fiscal year '94 there was no such special budget.
Nevertheless, the regular budgets allowed for some significant supercomputer installations. The biggest system that was installed in that time frame is a VPP500/80 at the Research Lab for High Energy Physics. Further VPP500 systems have been installed at the Solid State Physics Institute of Tokyo University, at the Computing Centre of Kyoto University and at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Lab. Great attention was given to the success of CRI at the Fluid Dynamics Research Institute of Tohoku University and the Tokyo Engineering University. Two C916 systems plus a T3D/128 MPP-system have been installed in these big, traditional universities. The Hokkaido University - a loyal Hitachi customer - installed a Hitachi S-3800/380 system in their large scale computing centre. MPP systems got only a small share of the budget. Beside the already mentioned T3D system, Intel succeeded to sell a Paragon system to the Japan Atomic Energy Research Lab, and the Electrical Power Development Corporation installed a nCube2S system.
The fiscal year '95 is still on-going. Few decisions have already been made. The computing centre of Nagoya University continues with Fujitsu systems and has installed a VPP500/42. The computing centre of Tokyo University ordered the MPP system from Hitachi. A SR2201 system with 1024 processors will be installed early next year. It will be interesting to watch whether the computer centre of Tokyo University - one of the most important customers of Hitachi - will move from vector computing to the MPP style. This could influence the future supercomputer strategy of Hitachi. So far, it is not clear whether Hitachi will announce a successor vector system.
It is well known that the big Japanese universities have long lasting relations to a vendor. The general purpose computing centres tend to stay loyal with their vendor. However, institutes of these universities are more independent and procure their own systems. Often, they decide for systems from other vendors than the one of the computing centre.