This report consists of ten articles. The first five articles present a detailed analysis of the high-performance computing situation as of November 1995. The next four articles focus on different aspects of the hardware and software of the systems, which can be seen in the TOP500 . The final article is a complete reprint of the November 1995 issues of the ``TOP500 Supercomputer Sites,'' which provides the basis of this report.
Meuer and Strohmaier analyze in the first article the general worldwide trends, which are revealed by the six releases of the TOP500 published in the past three years. They present the changes over time with respect to geography, manufacturers, applications, architectures, and technology. Dongarra and Simon present an in-depth analysis of the U.S. situation of the field of high-performance computing. Hoffman and Schnepf give an overview of the Japanese installations and Japanese vendors and the differences to the overall market. Harms discusses the European situation and provide a brief summary on computing in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Benelux nations. Bez and Simon present a short description of the 25 centers with the highest accumulated performance installed. Van der Steen summarizes the new architectures of the different systems in the TOP500 giving a concise description for each architecture. Dongarra and Walker present an overview of the new MPI standard, which is at present the most promising attempts to create a standardized programming environement for parallel computers with distributed memory. Nagel et al. descibe in their article a new graphical interface for tracing, debugging and performance tuning for MPI. As a case study for Cluster computing Mierendorf, Schüller and Trottenberg present their results for running the IFS weather prediction model of the ECMWF on a cluster of four full blown C90s. For this work they were awarded the SuParCup'95 at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar '95.