Overview of recent supercomputers reportUtrecht 23 August 2001 Aad van der Steen and Jack Dongarra published the eleventh edition of the report Overview of recent supercomputers in which they give an overview of parallel and vector systems that are commercially available or are expected to become available within a short time frame (typically a few months to half a year). They conclude that the number of systems that enter and leave the market are more or less in balance. There is one architecture emerging: Clusters of RISC based SMP nodes connected by a fast netwok.
At this moment
systems appearing on and disappearing from the market are approximately
in balance. One of the reasons for this seems to be the
ASCI programme, in the USA that has
given a big impulse to the HPC industry in the USA.
Furthermore, there is the more or less natural wave motion of older
systems that are withdrawn and are replaced by newer models. Generally,
one could say that the trend of the past few years in which more
systems disappeared than new ones were introduced does not seem to
continue.
Almost any new system looks as minor
variations on the same theme: clusters of RISC-based Symmetric
Multi-Processing (SMP) nodes which in turn are connected by a fast
network. Van der Steen and Dongarra say it may
also be argued that the requirements formulated in the ASCI program has
steered these systems in this direction.
The supercomputer market is a very dynamic one and this is especially
true for the Beowulf clusters that have emerged at a tremendous rate in
the last few years. The number of vendors that sell pre-configured
clusters has boomed accordingly. However, Van der Steen and Dongarra decidednot
not to include such configurations in their report.
This year, the authors introduced a new section: Processors with an emphais on RISc processors.
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