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November 1996

The 8th TOP500 list was published at the SC96 Conference in Pittsburgh, CA (November 17-22, 1996).

Hand in hand with this increase is the trend toward computing nodes built with boards which come directly from workstations, and are binary compatible with the workstation systems. The most dominant examples of this are the SGI Power Challenge, the IBM SP/2 and HP/Convex SPP. These three vendors are selling more systems to industrial customers than the average. They represent 50 percent of all 500 systems --- not taking the Cray-based system from SGI into account. In the industrial market place, they represent 75 percent of the 148 industrial systems in the TOP500.

The combined company SGI/Cray Research is leading the list again with 222 systems. However, looking at them separately they change individual positions as 131 systems are Cray-based and 91 SGI-based. The 23 new T3E systems on the list are the major reason for this shift. IBM is in a strong second place with 126 systems.

IBM shows its full strength with 148 industrial installations. IBM leads with 67 systems, even ahead of SGI/Cray with 58 systems. As all IBM systems are SP2s, this shows that parallel systems with distributed memory are gaining acceptance from commercial customers.

The entry level of the TOP500 was shifted to 4.62 GFlop/s, which is the major reason for a decrease of symmetrical multiprocessor systems (SMP) in the TOP500.

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