Japan

Japan is maturing in its use and production of high-performance systems. The Japanese have elevated vector processing to a fine art, both in the case of hardware and software, and are producing world-class systems that rival those of Cray. Moreover, the installed base of supercomputers in Japan has climbed to over 150, the number of Japanese researchers working in the realm of computational science and engineering is growing, and the quality of their work is improving.

The first vector processors to emerge from Japan, such as the Fujitsu VP-200, generated a lot of excitement. Initial benchmarks indicated that these early supercomputers, with lots of vector pipelines—characteristic of the Japanese machines—were very fast. The Fujitsu machine was followed by the Hitachi S-820 and then the Nippon Electric Company (NEC) SX-2, which was, at that time, the fastest single processor in the

world.^[*] These machines also boasted many vector pipes, as well as automatic interactive vectorizing tools of high quality.

Recent Japanese announcements indicate that the trend toward greater vectorization will continue. The NEC SX-3, for example, employs a processor that can produce 16 floating-point results every three-nanosecond clock cycle, a performance that amounts to more than five GFLOPS per processor.

It merits mention, however, that while Japanese high-performance computers compete well in the "megaflop derby," their sustained performance on production workloads remains unknown. Huge memory bandwidth hides behind the caches of these Japanese machines, and the memories are a fairly long distance from the processors, which probably inhibits their short vector performance.

Parallel processing is not, however, being ignored in Japan. The Japanese have a number of production parallel processors now to which they are devoting much attention. In at least two areas of parallel processing, the Japanese have made significant progress. Most, if not all, Japanese semiconductor manufacturers are using massively parallel circuit simulators, and the NEC fingerprint identification machine, used in police departments worldwide, represents one of the largest-selling massively parallel processors in the world.

The Japanese recently have begun showing signs of accommodating U.S. markets. For one thing, Japanese manufacturers are exhibiting some willingness to accommodate the IEEE and Cray floating-point arithmetic formats, in addition to the IBM format their machines currently support. Secondly, some machines, notably the SX-3, now run UNIX. These and other existing signs indicate that the Japanese seek not only to accommodate the American market but to aggressively enter it.

The software products available on Japanese supercomputers and the monitoring tools available to scientific applications programmers from Japanese vendors appear to be as good as or better than those available from Cray Research. Consequently, applications software being developed in Japan may be better vectorized as a result of the better tools and vendor-supplied software. Further, Japanese supercomputer centers seem to be having little, if any, difficulty obtaining access to the best U.S.-developed applications software.

While the U.S. appears to be preeminent in all basic research areas of computational science and engineering, the Japanese are making

significant strides as the current generation of researchers matures in its use of supercomputers and a younger generation is trained in computational science and engineering. The environment in which Japanese researchers work is also improving, with supercomputer time and better software tools being made increasingly available. Networking within the Japanese supercomputing community, however, remains underdeveloped.

The American, Soviet, European, and Japanese machines and their parameters are compared in Table 1.