Changing technologies of HPC

In 1993 for the first time a list of the top 500 supercomputer sites world-wide was made available. The Top500 list allows a much more detailed and well-founded analysis of the state of high performance computing. Previously data such as the number and geographical distribution of supercomputer installations were difficult to obtain, and only a few analysts undertook the effort to track the press releases by dozens of vendors. With the Top500 report now generally and easily available it is possible to present an analysis of the state of High Performance Computing (HPC). This paper summarizes some of the most important observations about HPC as of late 1996, in particular the continued dominance of the world market in HPC by the US, the market penetration by commodity microprocessor based systems, and the growing industrial use of super-computers.