Western Europe

In Western Europe, while there has been no prominent commercial attempt to build vector processors, much attention has been paid to developing distributed processing and massively parallel, primarily Transputer-based, processors. Efforts in this realm have resulted in predominantly T-800 Transputer-based machines claiming processing rates of 1.5 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS) per processor, with up to 1000 processors and with RISC-based chips promising to play a sizable role in the future. To date, however, the Europeans have been low-volume producers, with few companies having shipped more than a handful of machines. Two such exceptions are the U.K.'s Meiko and Germany's Parsytec.

Meiko and Parsytec have proved to be the two most commercially successful European supercomputer manufacturers, with over 300 and 600 customers worldwide, respectively. Meiko produces two scalable, massively parallel dynamic-architecture machines—the Engineer's Computing Surface and the Embedded Real-Time Computing Surface—

with no inherent architectural limit on the number of processors. Among Meiko's clients are several branches of the U.S. military and the National Security Agency. Parsytec's two Transputer-based MIMD systems, the MultiCluster and SuperCluster, are available in configurations with maximums of 64 and 400 processors, respectively.

Lesser manufacturers of high-performance computing include Parsys, Active Memory Technology (AMT), and ESPRIT—the European Strategic Program for Research and Development in Information Technology.^[*] The U.K.-based Parsys is the producer of the SuperNode 1000, another Transputer-based parallel processor, with 16 to 1024 processors in hierarchical, reconfigurable arrays. AMT's massively parallel DAP/CP8 510C (1024 processors) and 610C (4096 processors) boast processing speeds of 5000 MIPS (140 MFLOPS) and 20,000 MIPS (560 MFLOPS), respectively. Spearheaded by the Germans, ESPRIT's SUPRENUM project has produced the four-GFLOPS, MIMD SUPRENUM-1 and is continuing development of the more powerful SUPRENUM-2.

The Europeans have proved themselves as experts in utilizing vector processors as workhorses. Vector processors can be found in use in Germany, France, and England. Though the Europeans have been extensive users of U.S.-made machines, Japanese machines have recently started to penetrate the European market.