Hans W. Meuer and Erich Strohmaier
In 1995 the field of High Performance Computing (HPC) faced a major move of their building blocks --the computing nodes-- away from proprietary designs towards nodes built out of workstation boards. This movement came along with the success of companies like Silicon Graphics and IBM. As the other companies acting in this field are also moving to CMOS as basic technology these two companies along with Convex/HP are building their HPC systems not only with CPUs but with boards "off-the-shelf" from successful workstation families. Major signs for the success of this approach are not only the pure number of systems they can sell, but the percentage of systems they are able to sell to industrial users. We will discuss in this paper the different developments based on the TOP500 lists of supercomputer sites available since June 1993 [1] and which, for the first time, provide a reliable base for a well-founded analysis of the high-performance computing field. Reports about the situation in 1993 and 1994 have been published before [2] and [3].