Hitachi Ltd is pitching for world leadership in the supercomputer stakes with a system being designed to deliver 1.7Glops, for delivery next spring. Coming in above the 810 and 820, the top machine of which is rated at 630Mflops, it will outperform Japan’s current performance leader, the NEC SX-2, rated at 1.3Gflops. Cray Research and ETA Systems will almost certainly say that the Cray-2 and ETA-10 outperform either, but Hitachi looks to get the performance out of a single CPU where the big US supers are multiprocessors. However Japan’s ICOT Institute for Computers Of Tomorrow is working on compile algorithms that assume a multiprocessor, so MP configurations of the Nippon CPUs are likely.
