Looking at the TOP500 systems installed we see a quite stable distribution over time in Fig. 2. The upward trend of systems in the US and the downward trend in Japan still goes on. This reflects the fact that Japan is behind in the number of installed SMP systems.
Figure 2: The geographical distribution of
the system counts over time.
Looking at the total of installed performance in Fig. 3, contrary to the number of systems seen in Fig. 2, Japan is again well ahead of Europe as it was in the last years. This reflects the fact that during the last years several very powerful VPP500 systems were installed in Japan all belonging to the TOP500. Taking a closer look at the strong increase of the installed performance in the US during the last year, we find that IBM installed 457 Gflop/s, Cray Research 388 Gflop/s and SGI 319 Gflop/s. This leaves only 104 Gflop/s to all other vendors.
Figure 3: The geographical distribution of the
performance over time.
If we not only look at where the systems are installed but where they are manufactured, we see in Table 1 that almost all systems located in the US were built in the US. In Japan, too, most systems come from Japanese manufacturers, but the share of US manufacturers is much higher than vice versa. Still the market shares do not reflect the worldwide distribution. The European vendors on the contrary are not dominating their home market. Most of the systems installed in Europe are coming from US vendors. The share of Japanese systems is slightly lower compared to their world-wide average. Looking at the installed performance on Table 2, we get a similar picture with an even stronger dominance of the US and Japanese vendors on their home market.
in Gflop/s