Fujitsu Ltd has ambitious plans to lead the European market in sales of supercomputers, and aims to ship at least ten systems over the next year – helped by its partnership with Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, which market the VPP series of vector parallel processors under its own name in Europe. Siemens has just finished installing a 52 processor VPP700 system at the Munich-based Leibniz-Rechenzentrum research center, which, at 114 GFlops, is claimed to be the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The VPP700, launched last year, uses custom 0.35 micron CMOS chips and is scalable up to 256 processing elements. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Shenley Park, Reading, UK, is another customer for the systems. Fujitsu signed a long-term technology sharing agreement with Siemens way back in 1978.
