Overview of High Performance Computers

Abstract

The overview given here concentrates on the computational capabilities of the systems discussed. To do full justice to all assets of present days high-performance computers one should list their I/O performance and their connectivity possibilities as well. However, the possible permutations of configurations even for one model of a certain system often are so large that they would multiply the volume of this report, which we tried to limit for greater clarity. So, not all features of the systems discussed will be present. Still we think (and certainly hope) that the impressions obtained from the entries of the individual machines may be useful to many. We also omitted some systems that may be characterized as “high-performance” in the fields of database management, real-time computing, or visualization. Therefore, as we try to give an overview for the area of general scientific and technical computing, systems that are primarily meant for database retrieval like the AT&T GIS systems or concentrate exclusively on the real-time user community, like Concurrent Computing Systems, are not discussed in this report. Although most terms will be familiar to many readers, we still think it is worthwhile to give some of the definitions in section 2 because some authors tend to give them a meaning that may slightly differ from the idea the reader already has acquired.