Minisupercomputers

The first viable supersubstitutes, minisupercomputers, were introduced in 1983. They support a modestly interactive, distributed mode of use and exploit the gap left when DEC began in earnest to ignore its

[*] A prize of $1000 is given in each of three categories of speed and parallelism to recognize applications programs. The 1988 prizes went to a 1024-node nCUBE at Sandia and a CRAY X-MP/416 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; in 1989 a CRAY Y-MP/832 ran the fastest.

technical user base. In terms of power and usage, their relationship to supercomputers is much like that of minicomputers to mainframes. Machines from Alliant Computer Systems and CONVEX Computer Corporation have a computational capacity approaching one CRAY Y-MP processor.

Until the introduction of graphics supercomputers in 1988, minisupers were the most cost-effective source of supercomputing capacity. But they are under both economic and technological pressure from newer classes of technical computers. The leading minisuper vendors are responding to this pressure in different ways. Alliant plans to improve performance and reduce computing costs by using a cost-effective commodity chip, Intel's i860 RISC microprocessor. CONVEX has yet to announce its next line of minisupercomputers; however, it is likely to follow the Cray path of a higher clock speed using ECL.