Abstract
This paper reviews present developments in concurrent 'supercomputers' taking place in Europe. After some preliminary discussion of the terms of reference, the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer project is described in some detail. This is probably the most serious attempt within Europe to use a highly parallel machine as the basis for a real user service. The hardware is based on Meiko's Computer Surface and the system contains over 400 Inmos T800 transputers. The only commercial non-transputer parallel system produced in Europe is the Suprenum machine. The architecture of this machine is a hierarchical bus-based distributed-memory MIMD system with clusters of vector processing nodes. Their first customer shipment took place at the end of 1989 and some early results on simple performance benchmarks are presented. Two recently-funded special-purpose parallel machines for QCD are then described. The first is the APE-100, a custom-VLSI successor to the original Italian APE project. The second is the QCD-20 project in the UK which combines the processing and communicating capabilities of the Intel i860 and the Inmos T800 transputer. The Inmos T800 transputer was a result of the Esprit Supernode project which also produced a reconfigurable transputer architecture now manufactured by Parsys in the UK and Telmat in Trance. In the Espril-2 research programme, the Genesis and PUMA projects are directed at highly parallel architectures for numerical computing. The results of the Genesis Evaluation group and the Genesis Parallel Benchmark suite of Fortran programmes are summarized along with brief details of the Genesis and Puma projects. Inmos are participating in the Puma project which will deliver their next generation parallel-processing components. Some comments on the possibility of constructing genuinely general-purpose parallel computers with scalable performance are included as a conclusion.