The Supercomputer Industry

The business climate of the 1990s offers further evidence that big machines may be out of step with more cost-effective, modern computing styles. Table 2 shows the number of companies involved in the highly competitive technical computing industry. The business casualties in the high end of the computer industry last year constitute another indicator that the big-machine approach to technical computing might be flawed. No doubt, a variety of factors contributed to the demise of Control Data Corporation's Engineering Technology Associates Systems subsidiary (St. Paul, Minnesota), Chopp (San Diego, California), Cydrome Inc. (San Jose, California), Evans & Sutherland's startup supercomputer division (Sunnyvale, California), Multiflow Computer (New Haven, Connecticut), and Scientific Computer Systems (San Diego, California). But in an enormously crowded market, being out of step with the spirit of the times might have had something to do with it.

With Cray Research, Inc., having spun off Cray Computer Corporation and with several other startups designing supercomputers, it's hard to get very worried about the U.S. position vis-à-vis whether enough is being done about competitiveness. Unfortunately, less and less is being spent on the underlying circuit technologies for the highest possible speeds. It's fairly easy to predict that of the half-dozen companies attempting to build new supers, there won't be more than three viable U.S. suppliers, whereas today we only have one.

From an economic standpoint, the U.S. is fortunate that the Japanese firms are expending large development resources that supercomputers require because these same engineers could, for example, be building consumer products, robots, and workstations that would have greater impact on the U.S. computer and telecommunications markets. It would be very smart for these Japanese manufacturers to fold up their expensive efforts and leave the small but symbolically visible supercomputer market to the U.S. Japan could then continue to improve its position in the larger consumer and industrial electronics, communication, and computing sectors.