Workstations

Workstations from companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the Hewlett-Packard Company, Silicon Graphics Inc., and Sun Microsystems, among others, provide up to 10 per cent of the capacity of a CRAY Y-MP processor. But they do it at speeds of less than 0.3 per cent of an eight-processor Y-MP LINPACK peak and at about two per cent the speed of a single-processor Y-MP on the LINPACK 100-×-100 benchmark. Thus, while they may achieve impressive scalar performance, they have no way to hit performance peaks for the compute-intensive programs for which the vector and parallel capabilities of supercomputers were developed. As a result, they are not ideal as supersubstitutes. Nevertheless, ordinary computers like workstations, PCs, minicomputers, and superminis together provide most of the technical computing power available today.