HPC has become truly a tool for scientific investigation

In the software section, only the very basics are treated: languages, interprocessing communications and some tools and libraries. Although it gives a good introduction into the current state of the art, applications are not treated at all, and the tools and library sections are rather limited. The next section describes strategic issues, such as European networking, training, visualisation and data management.

Baxter notes that being major consumers of high-performance computing, it is somewhat remarkable that Europe has no HPC industry to speak of. Of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world in June 1999, 134 were European (EU plus Norway and Switzerland) compared to 292 US and only 57 Japanese [36]. In terms of vendors from the same list, 56 systems were supplied by Japanese firms, 442 by US firms, one system was self-made and one was from a European firm, Siemens AG, and that was built from Intel processors.

So, Europe has 27% of the consumer market but only 0.2% of the supplier market, concludes Baxter. "Why should Europe have such a poor showing in supplying HPC to the world, or even to itself? Europe has plenty of world-class firms in electronics, communications, even software, why not top-end computing?" he asks himself.

"Perhaps Europe feels it has no need. The European HPC consumer market is reasonably open to both US and Japanese vendors. Europe has never felt the need to indulge itself in the trade wars that underline US-Japanese relations in such areas as strategic computing, so maybe the European market simply finds it cheaper to buy imports than build its own. On the other hand, the concept of Europe in this commercial sense is relatively new. Europe is a collection of nation states, and national interests and competition between national computer firms has not offered the most favourable environment for the creation of entities large enough to compete with the USA or Japan."

On the positive side, Baxter sees the QNet network developed originally by the UK firm Meiko Ltd and now sold by QSW. Part of Italy's Finmeccanica group, it is one of the fastest processor interconnect products on the market today and has been chosen by Compaq for its forthcoming AlphaServer cluster technology.

In his conclusion, Baxter says that HPC has changed considerably over the years. In the early days, it promised a lot, but it took a long time to deliver. He believes that it finally has deliverd, and that the demands of the users have shifted accordingly: "Offering six-times speed up on an eight-processor parallel system is no longer considered an achievement. HPC has become truly a tool for scientific investigation."