IBM yesterday formally announced the new European Centre for Scientific Computing in Rome that we told subscribers about in CI No 687, and said that a similar centre was being established in Tokyo. The two new numerically-intensive computing centres complement the ones established late in 1986 in Kingston, New York and and Palo Alto, California, and underline the company’s intention of carving itself a share of the market currently dominated by Cray Research. Its chosen vehicle is of course the Vector Facility on the Sierra 3090s, which currently goes up to six processors and six vectors, and is expected to rise to eight in the autumn. The Rome centre is researching applications related to seismic data processing, fluid dynamics, finance, mathematics, and chemistry, while Tokyo is working on structural analysis and electronic design as well as finance and fluid dynamics again. Industrial and academic partnerships are also being struck.
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