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November 1995

The 6th TOP500 list was published at the SC95 Conference in San Diego, California (December 3-8, 1995).

Certain trends are becoming clear, authors of the TOP500 noted in a recent press release. In the first list (June 93) 66 percent of the installed systems were based on ECL (Emitter-coupled Logic), in the new list only 20 percent of the 500 listed systems are built with ECL.

Hand in hand with this evolution comes the trend toward computing nodes built with boards coming directly from workstations and being binary compatible with the workstation systems. The most dominant examples for this are the Power Challenge, the IBM SP/2 and Convex SPP. In all, these systems represent 53 percent of all 500 systems.

While SGI was able to remain in first position with respect to the manufacturer with the greatest number of systems (125 systems instead of 128 in the last report six months ago), IBM was able to improve its standing, going up from 72 to 116 systems, thus becoming second even ahead of Cray Research Inc.

Cray Research faced a decrease from 125 to 93 systems this time. This decrease was mainly due to the fact that neither the original Cray Y-MP nor the new "bestseller" J-90 (Jedi) appear on the list, the press release noted. The entry at position 500 is a Cray Y-MP/C90 with 3 processors showing more than 2.4 GFlops/s Linpack performance.

If it comes to performance however, Cray still leads the pack having installed about 25 percent of the total listed performance of 4.8 TFlops/s for all 500 systems. Second in this class is IBM with 18 percent passing the previous second Fujitsu, which still has 16 percent of the total performance installed in their vector systems. SGI and Intel each contribute about 11 percent to the accumulated overall performance.

For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.