West Germany will joint the list of countries with a supercomputer industry when its quasi-national Suprenum project comes to fruition at the real Hanover Fair, the original April Industrial Fair, not the emasculated affair on this week. Suprenum GmbH, based in Bonn, plans to show off its eponymous parallel processor – the name stands for Supecomputer for Numerical Applications – at the Fair, with the claim that the machine solves the problem of efficient communication between the processor nodes. The prototype of the Suprenum-1 to be shown at Hanover will have only 32 node processors, each rated at up to 20 MFLOPS to create a 640 MFLOPS peak machine. But by year-end, the aim is to have a 256-node Suprenum, which the designers claim will do 5 GFLOPS peak, topping the Cray Research Inc Cray-2. The full-scale Suprenum-1 will have 16 clusters, each consisting of 16 vector processing nodes plus four housekeeping nodes for disk control, diagnostics and communications. Each node consists of a Weitek floating point chip set, with 8Mb of memory using non volatile RAMs made in the UK, and custom gate arrays, all under the control of a Motorola 68020 and mounted on a ceramic substrate measuring 8.8 by 18.9. According to the International Herald Tribune, software has already been developed for solving fluidic dynamics problems, Euler and Navier Stokes equations, plus demonstration software to show the machine’s versatility. Suprenum GmbH, 54% owned by Krupp Atlas Elektronik AG, 18% by Stollmann AG and 20% by the GMD German National Research Centre, with another 12 investors holding the balance, hopes to have sold two or three of the machines, which run up to $16m in price, by the end of this year. Over half of the $100m expense of the project has been borne by the federal government, with NordRhein-Westfalen chipping in, and the universities of Darmstadt, Braunschweig, Bonn, Dusseldorf and Erlangen all contribu ting work. The project has slipped a bit and over-run its budget: at the beginning of 1986, when Suprenum GmbH was formed, the aim was to have the su percomputer ready by 1988, on a $40m budget (CI No 342).
