The marketplace of high-performance computing

In this paper we analyze the major trends and changes in the High Performance Computing (HPC) market place since the beginning of the journal `Parallel Computing'. The initial success of vector computers in the seventies was driven by raw performance. The introduction of this type of computer systems started the area of `Supercomputing'. In the eighties the availability of standard development environments and of application software packages became more important. These criteria determined next to performance the success of MP vector systems especially at industrial customers. MPPs became successful in the early nineties due to their better price/performance ratios which was enabled by the attack of the `killer-micros'. In the lower and medium market segments the MPPs were replaced by microprocessor based SMP systems in the middle of the nineties. This success was the basis for the emerging cluster concepts for the very high end systems. In the last few years only the companies which have entered the emerging markets for massive parallel database servers and nancial applications attract enough business volume to be able to support the hardware development for the numerical high end computing market as well. Success in the traditional oating point intensive engineering applications seems to be no longer su cient for survival in the market.