Let us now try to analyze the technology used for the processors. With respect to the chip technology we find that the number of systems based on ECL chip technology is steadily decreasing from 332 in mid 1993 to 101 by the end of 1995. During the same time the number of systems using proprietary processors with custom chips decreased from 59 to 35. 364 of the systems in the current list are built by using `off-the-shelf' processors.
Figure 7: The usage of different node technologies
as can be seen
in the TOP500. We count for this figure the following systems
as CMOS off-the-shelf: Convex SPP, IBM SP1/2, SGI.
In Fig. 7 we see that the number of systems with nodes binary-compatible to workstation systems has increased tremendously during the last two years and has now reached 52%. This class of systems includes the ones from Silicon Graphics, the Convex SPP and the IBM SP1 and SP2. The very strong increase of systems with such a node design indicates a new and very strong trend in the field of high performance computing. This trend is supported by the advantage of using standard workstation nodes keeping the design costs low. Also all available software for the workstations can immediately be used on the parallel systems, at least on a single processor. This seems to be a big advantage for selling systems to industrial users as can be seen in the next section.