NHSE ReviewTM 1996 Volume First Issue

Overview of Recent Supercomputers

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3.4 Distributed-memory MIMD systems

In particular for this class of systems we cannot claim completeness of this overview. This has two reasons: First, at present this is the most dynamic area of development of new machines and it is quite probable that already new systems appear on the market while this report goes to "print". This in no way implies that the systems not mentioned here should be in any way inferior to the ones that appear in this section. It is rather felt that many of these systems are in some sense equivalent and listing (almost) all of the systems would be counterproductive in the sense that the descriptions of the systems might lead to confusion.

For distributed-memory MIMD machines obviously the internode bandwidth and latency are very important system parameters. Unfortunately, it is very hard to come by reliable figures for these parameters. Therefore, we only can state the internode bandwidth point-to-point for the majority of systems, not for all. Where we do not have these figures we give the aggregate bandwidth which is less informative but better than nothing. We were not able to give latency figures for the systems for two reasons: manufacturers mostly state hardware latencies which, regrettably, does not say very much about the actual latency, except that the hardware latency is a guaranteed lower bound. The second reason is that the actual (software) latency, even if known at some point in time, decreases very fast, as better implementation of the communication software occurs continuously. Therefore, stating figures for this system parameter is next to useless at the moment even when very much desired.

  1. The Alex AVX 2.
  2. The Avalon A12.
  3. The C-DAC PARAM 9000/SS.
  4. The Cray Research Inc. T3E.
  5. The Fujitsu AP1000.
  6. The Fujitsu VPP300 series.
  7. The Hitachi SR2201 series.
  8. The HP/Convex Exemplar SPP-1200.
  9. The IBM 9076 SP2
  10. The Intel Paragon XP.
  11. The Matsushita ADENART.
  12. The Meiko Computing Surface 2.
  13. The nCUBE 3.
  14. The NEC Cenju-3.
  15. The Parallel Computing Industries system.
  16. The Parsys TA9000.
  17. The Parsytec GC/Power Plus.
Copyright © 1996 Aad J. van der Steen and Jack J. Dongarra

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Lowell W Lutz (lwlutz@rice.edu) NHSE ReviewTM WWWeb Editor