Return of the dinosaurs: US governement to support vector supercomputers

Mountain View 30 Sep 99 The recent successes of the Japanese vector supercomputers, Hitachi, NEC and Fujitsu in sales of high-end vector supercomputers in Europe and the problems of transferring large effecient codes to large parallel machines, have brought a change to the US HPC policy. Untill know, parallel was en vogue and vector processing was old-fashioned. Well, not so any more. The US Administration is now supporting the development of the Cray SV-2 , a classic multi-processor vector computer. There are critical government applications that need a vector processor.

Comments in the press release form SGI, highlight the importance of vector machines for many application areas.

"The United States is committed to maintaining and building on its long-held position as the global leader in supercomputing," said George Cotter, chief scientist, NSA. "These powerful computers are absolutely essential to U.S. national security interests. To that end, the U.S. government is committing significant support to SGI's Cray SV2 program."

"The government support reflects a continuing need for government-industry cooperative development of critical technologies for high-end computing," said Cotter. "The SV2 will include technology jointly developed with the U.S. government. This will considerably extend the combination of custom-designed high-end processors with the high-speed memory access that current Cray supercomputers offer."

In addition to critical government applications, the Cray SV2 supercomputer will contribute to advances in areas such as automotive design, aerospace engineering, weather and climate prediction, and academic research. The supercomputer will feature powerful vector processors while exploiting ccNUMA architecture. Plans call for the system to scale to peak performances of multiple tens of teraflops.

US. government support for SGI's Cray SV2 program underscores the critical importance of the next generation of Cray supercomputers," said John R. "Beau" Vrolyk, senior vice president, Product Group, SGI. "SGI is also making a substantial R&D investment in the development of this system and is committed to maintaining global leadership in this class of technologies and systems."

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