The belief that Japan Inc would continue to flounder as it tried to master supercomputer technology has been shattered by accepted claims that NEC Corp probably now has the world’s most powerful conventional supercomputer in the SX-3, and the success that Fujitsu Ltd has had in marketing its VP machines in the US and particularly in Europe. The numbers may be small, but then the world installed base of supercomputers is still very small, and each Japanese sale is a sale lost to Cray Research Inc, currently the only convincing US contender. US President George Bush has unveiled plans for a five year $638m programme to boost US supercomputer and communications technology as well as speeding up commercial availability of new products. Electronic News says that funding for the High Performance Computing and Communications programme represent a 30% increase over planned expenditure levels, and the largest chunk of funding, $265.1m, go towards software technology and algorithms. The proposals call for research into advanced compiler technology, optimisation and parallelisation tools, interoperability and data management, visualisation, debugging and analysis and performance measurement. Hardware will also receive a substantial investment, with $156.8m earmarked for research in scalable processors, memory input output devices and operating systems for supercomputers in the TeraFLOPS performance range. $91.9m will be spent on upgrading existing research done by the National Research and Education Network, focusing on Gigabit-per-second network switches, protocols, software and security mechanisms. A further $124.5m will be dedicated to basic research and human resources, which Electronic News describes as leapfrog advances in technology and extensive training. Eight federal agencies will have responsibility for the new programmes, and $232.2m of the Department of Energy’s budget has been proposed for high-performance computing work, although the US government expects industry and academia to share the burden of costs.
