TECHNOLOGY/SUPERCOMPUTER MARKET GETTING CROWDED
The supercomputer industry is getting
crowded as a handful of startup companies and some huge
Japanese manufacturers compete for the right to apply the label
"world's fastest machine" to their products.
    Currently there are only about 250 supercomputers installed
around the world, but many believe that situation is about to
change dramatically as these highly specialized and extremely
expensive machines move out of the research laboratories where
most of them are found today and into commerical applications.
    "It is commercial supercomputing... that holds the most
promise for this young industry's handful of vendors," said
Gary Smaby, supercomputer analyst for Piper Jaffray and
Hopwood.
    These commercial applications, he said, could propel annual
sales of supercomputers from 850 mln dlrs in 1986 to 2.4
billion by 1990.
    For years two companies, Cray Research Inc <CYR> and
Control Data Corp  <CDA> were virtually the only options for
customers seeking to buy supercomputers.
    But in the last three years a number of new companies have
announced supercomputers using some innovative technologies,
and the industry finally expanded enough to hold its first
World Supercomputer Exhibition in Santa Clara last month.
    Also in the last month two small companies, ETA Systems Inc
(a subsidiary of Control Data) and Thinking Machines Corp  both
laid claim to having the world's fastest computer and a joint
venture of Honeywell Inc <HON> and Japan's NEC Corp <NIPN.T>
Honeywell-NEC Supercomputers Inc, announced its entrance into
the U.S. market.
    All three are aiming at industry leader Cray Research Inc,
which holds more than 60 pct of the market.
    This week, Cray plans to make a joint announcement with
Digital Equipment Corp, <DEC> already the world's largest
minicomputer maker, of some products that will work on both
companies' computers, expanding the market opportunities for
both supers and minis even further.
    Supercomputers were initially designed only for the most
complex of applications, such as predicting worldwide weather
patterns, fusion energy research or military defense and
weapons design.
    They are built for speed, not for standard business
functions such as payroll processing. The fastest
supercomputers can perform more than a billion calculations per
second, greater than the combined power of 100,000 personal
computers.
    They also carry stratospheric price tags of between one mln
to 20 mln dlrs each, which is why Cray's revenues could reach
600 mln dlrs last year even though it only shipped 36 new and
10 used supercomputers, a level that would spell starvation for
any standard computer company.        
    But speakers at the supercomputer exhibition emphasized
that a host of new applications should increase total industry
shipments to 150 systems a year by the end of the decade.
    Most commercial customers of supercomputers now use the
machines to simulate a physical process, such as the flow of
air over an aircraft wing, in design and testing work.
    But financial institutions, particularly Wall Street
brokerage houses, are considered the next major buyers of
supercomputers as they try to recognize changes in stock
trading patterns faster than any of their competitors.
    Two firms, Goldman Sachs and Co and Morgan Stanley and Co,
are now using superminicomputers, hybrid machines that are
faster than a minicomputer but cheaper than a super, to create
financial models of the stock and bond markets.
    Analysts said it is only a matter of time before actual
supercomputers are found on Wall Street.
    One reason for the shift to commercial applications is that
supercomputers are coming down in price as new technologies
provide greater speed at lower costs than the Cray and Control
Data behemoths.
    Both the ETA and Thinking Machines Systems use a technology
called parallel processing, in which a number of internal
processors work together to solve a problem.
    With such systems a problem is broken up and different
segments are assigned to different processors. By contrast,
standard computers solve a problem one instruction at a time,
or sequentially.
    The ETA system, the ETA 10, will eventually use as many as
eight parallel processors capable of processing up to 8.32
billion operations per second.
    However, the first ETA 10, installed at Florida State
University, has only two processors, later to be expanded to
four.  ETA president Lloyd Thorndyke said the ETA 10 represents
a drastic change in architecture from parent company Control
Data's Cyber system.
    Priced from 5.5 mln to 22 mln dlrs, the ETA 10 contains
about 240 chips in each of its processing units, built onto a
board about the size of a standard newspaper section.
    Each of these boards contains the equivalent of 1.5 miles
of embedded wiring.
    It took ETA about 3-1/2 years to develop its supercomputer
but Thorndyke said he expects much faster development time
frames in the futre, from both ETA and its competitors.
    "We're in a leapfrog business and we just took the last
leap," he said.
    Thinking Machines also claims to have the world's fastest
computer and in some ways this is true. Its Connection Machine
Model CM-2 can process 2.5 billion instructions per second, but
it is a very specialized architecture only meant for certain
very specific applications.
    The one mln to five mln dlr Connection Machine uses a
technology called "massive parallism." It contains 64,000
processors crammed into a five foot cube. The processors all
work on a problem at once, breaking it down into minute bits.
    It is an ideal tool for applications with many
unpredicatble variables, according to Brian Boyle, analyst for
Novon Research Group. "The more unpredictable things are, the
more the Thinking Machine will be appropriate," he said.       

 Reuter
