National critical technologies report.

  • United States. Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Date:
1995
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: National critical technologies report. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    speeds (a million million floating point instructions per second) in the foreseeable future. Massively parallel computing has direct applications in national defense warfighting and weapons control, war gaming, in the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicle, and the Global Climate Change and Human Genome research programs. While commercial applications are further off than research applications, parallel processing can have a secondary impact on the capabilities of U.S. science and engineering to maintain world class status. The U.S. has a technology lead in nearly all aspects of high-performance computers. Japanese computer firms continue to lag their U.S. counterparts in parallel computer technology and are facing mixed prospects. Japanese computer firms—primarily Fujitsu, NEC, and Hitachi—possess strong capabilities in some key supporting technologies. These firms have, for example, outstanding semiconductor component and circuit interconnection capabilities that could give them a distinct advantage over many of their U.S. counterparts in the hardware area. Japanese capabilities in components and board-level interconnection designs give them tremendous freedom to design innovative architectures. However, Japanese firms must overcome some tough technical hurdles before they can develop commercially successful parallel computer systems. Their most important task will be to close the large gap that exists with leading U.S. firms in parallel operating systems and applications software. Because the capabilities of a parallel system are largely determined by the capabilities of the systems software, any serious attempts by the Japanese to challenge U.S. dominance in parallel computers will require significant improvements in the software area. The United States and Europe have pursued parallel computing through increasing integration of processors, whereas Japanese efforts have emphasized peak vector processor performance. As a consequence of this difference in strategy, Japan has not produced massively parallel machines on a par with those in the United States. While Japanese multi-processor computers have a much higher theoretical peak performance than do their U.S. or European counterparts, U.S. systems can generally sustain higher performance for important applications. Most Japanese development projects started out emphasizing hardware systems tailored to specialized uses—such as image processing and. - simulation—but are now moving to more general applications in order to respond to market requirements. Europe also generally lags the United States in parallel processing computer technology. Individual European countries have the necessary R&D talent, but lack the capability to build a marketable product in a timely fashion. Despite the aid of numerous government programs to develop computational hardware technology, European firms remain far behind companies in the United States and Japan. Although there are many organizations within academia,