Bracknell, Berkshire-based Siemens-Nixdorf Information Systems Ltd has announced the S600 supercomputer, its own badged version of Fujitsu’s new VP2000 single-processor machine. The top-of-the-range supercomputer, which has one vector processor and one scalar processor yielding a real-time peak performance of 4.009 GFLOPS, is targeted at scientific and engineering applications. Fujitsu’s supers fall into the more conventional category of supercomputers, being parallel only on a very small scale, like the traditional Cray Research Inc machines. Siemens claims to be number two in the high-performance supercomputer market in Europe – Cray stands firm at number one with 90 to 100 installations, and Siemens has 12 systems installed, most of which are in the company’s domestic market of Germany, at university sites including Karlsruhe, Hannover and Aachen. Siemens has done Fujitsu’s European marketing for it since 1984, and has been rather more successful than Amdahl Corp with the machines, which Amdahl has now dropped.As yet, it has no supercomputers installed in the UK, but Laurie Scott and his supercomputer marketing team in Bracknell are committed to tackling Cray’s territory. The S-Series is field-upgradable the systems can currently take up to two vector processors and four scalar processors. The scalar units operate alternately with the vector processors, maximising the throughput and ensuring optimum use of the vector unit. The machines are offered with the VSP/S operating system – compatible with IBM’s MVS/XA interfaces and functions, the UXP/M implementation of Unix, and AVM/EX operating systems. The motherboard, made of glass ceramic, has 61 layers, accommodating 144 high density logic chips. An entry level S1000 system, with one vector and one scalar processor, costs between ?2.5m and ?3m and delivers 500 GFLOPS peak performance.
