While at the end of 1995 the top position of the TOP500 was still held by the Numerical Wind Tunnel (NWT) from Fujitsu, the list itself underwent quite a change. Only five new architectures entered the list, but most of them can be seen as pre-runners or first models of the new parallel systems generation. The Intel Paragon XP-MP as perhaps the first prototype of the coming Teraflop system for the DOD, the POWERCHALLENGEarray and the NEC SX-4, both architectures with a --quite different-- cluster approach and with excellent price-performance ratios, the Convex SPP1200 as followup of the SPP1000 with virtual shared memory and also with a hierarchical design, and Crays Triton, the only and most likely last new ECL based system. Many new systems appear in top positions of the list, many new T3Ds from Cray, and now also the big SP2s as performance values are available for them. Some of the newcomers already are present on the first pages of the TOP500. NEC having just installed a system at customer site (position 52) and beeing close to finishing other installations shows up with its internal SX-4 with 32 processors at position 9. Intel was able to sell a 1024 node system of their Paragon XP-MP to Oak Ridge, which holds position three on the list. SGI is also moving up with POWERCHALLENGEarrays starting with their internal 128 processor system at postion 30.
Looking at the computing power of the indiviual machines present in the TOP500 and the evolution of the total market size, we plot the performance of the systems at positions 1, 10, 100 and 500 in the list as well as the total accumulated performance. In Fig. 1 the curves of position 100 and 500 show on the average an increase of a factor of two within one year. The curves for position 1, 10 and for the accumulated performance however show only a factor of 1.8 increase per year.
Figure 1: The performance over time as it can be seen
in the TOP500.