Hitachi Ltd’s new supercomputer family – the Hitac S-3000, announced at end of March, includes 10 models, the top-of-the line S-3800/480 having a claimed peak performance of 32 GFLOPS in a four-processor configuration, 8 GFLOPS in the S-3800/160 single processor configuration. A second model group called the S-3600 has a performance range of between 2 GFLOPS in the S-3600/180 configuration and 250 MFLOPS in the S-3600/120 model. The top-end S-3800/160 used 25,000-gate-per-chip circuits with a propagation delay of just 60pS. The S-3800 model group also features a dynamic image output facility that enables images to be output in either NTSC or HDTV format at a rate of 30 images per second, plus a 100M-bytes-per-second HIPPI interface. The S-3600 model group of four systems is air-cooled and uses high-speed, highly integrated CMOS static RAMs. Main memory goes to 16Gb. The new supercomputers can run either Hitachi’s proprietary near-IBM-compatible VOS3/AS operating system, or the HI-OSF/1-MJ operating system, which is based on the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1 but has had other features added including vectorised Fortran, system and network management functions and improved batch processing. Hitachi obviously hopes that by offering Unix it can expand the range of applications available for its supercomputer series, beyond the 140 that are already available for VOS/3 which are runnable on the S-3800. It says it hopes to expand the current 10 applications available under the HI-OSF/1-MJ system to 150 applications over the next three years. Until this announcement NEC Corp claimed the title of the fastest supercomputer with its 25.6 GFLOPS SX-3 R series, while Cray Research Inc is still way in front in terms of availability of applications.
