Short description of newly featuring architectures in the Top500

Since the last TOP500 [3] report the list has changed on quite some points. In this article we indicate the systems that have dropped out and we describe the architectures that have come in newly.

The new list of the TOP500 systems

The new list is given in Table 1.

The changes in the list are less caused by systems that disappeared than by (variants of) systems that appear for the first time. The following systems have dropped from the list:

-

Fujitsu VP2000.

-

HP/Convex C4/XA.

-

Intel iPSC/860.

-

Kendall Square KSR-1.

The first two systems are vector processors. From these the Fujitsu VP2000 has been replaced by the newer VX systems that newly appear in the TOP500 list. The Fujitsu VP2000, Intel iPSC/860, and Kendall Square KSR-1 are not marketed anymore. The technology in the last two systems and their distribution is such that they could not hold their place anymore within the TOP500.

For the description of the various types of architectures one is referred to [2] or the experimental WWW version at

http://www.netlib.org/utk/papers/advanced-computers/paper.html

In this article we only describe the machines that appear for the first time in Table 1 in alphabetical order. Apart from the systems parameter list that is given for each system also the values of Rpeak and RMax as available from [1] are quoted together with the number of nodes associated with these values. The reason that the system parameter list is not sufficient is that the maximal theoretical peak performance is given for the maximal configuration of a system. Such a system may not actually exist.

Descriptions of machines

• The CP-PACS (Hitachi&Univ. of Tsukuba)
• The Cray Research Inc. T3E
• The Cray Research Inc. Cray J90-series
• The Digital Equipment Corp. AlphaServer
• The Fujitsu VPP300/700 series
• The Hitachi SR2201 series
• The HP/Convex Exemplar SPP-1600
• The HP/Convex Exemplar SPP-2000S
• The NEC SX-4
• Silicon Graphics PowerChallenge R10000
• Silicon Graphics Origin 2000.

References

1

Dongarra J.J., Performance of various computers using standard linear equations software, Computer Science Technical Report CS-89-85, Univ. of Tennessee, November 1995.

2

van der Steen A.J., Overview of recent supercomputers, 6th edition, NCF Report, The Hague, January 1996.

3

Dongarra J.J., H. Meuer, Erich Strohmaier (eds.), The 1995 TOP500 Report, Supercomputer, 12, No. 1, January 1996.

Aad van der Steen Utrecht University, Dept. of Computational Physics
Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Email: steen@fys.ruu.nl