Scientists from two US research centres and a European university have won the 1990 Gordon Bell Prize for price performance in parallel computing: the winners Al Geist and Malcolm Stocks of the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Beniamino Ginatemp of the University of Messina, Italy, and William Shelton of the US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC; the team developed a code that computes the electronic structure of high-temperature superconductors and other composite materials on a 128-node Intel Corp iPSC/860 parallel supercomputer; the 2.5 GFLOPS rate for the run on Intel’s system translated to a price performance of 840 megaFLOPS per million dollars.
