The current situation and development prospects of the computer industry

1. Introduction nbsp; The 21st century will be a century of high informationization, and the 21st century will be a century of computerization. In the computer family, supercomputer (or supercomputer) is the pinnacle of the development of computing technology. It concentrates the essence of modern high technology. Therefore, supercomputer technology and its supercomputer products are internationally recognized as a symbol of a country's comprehensive national strength. Experts believe that in the 21st century, supercomputers will be a key factor in determining who can lead economically, scientifically and technologically. The U.S. Department of Defense once claimed that "supercomputers are the pinnacle of computing technology. If the research and development of supercomputers lags behind foreign countries, national security will be threatened." There has been a fierce battle for supercomputers, everyone wants to be the first to get there and take the lead. To this end, they each used clever tactics to organize manpower, material resources, and financial resources, and formulated a five-year or ten-year plan for the development of supercomputers. The U.S. government has formulated a development plan for "Supercomputing and Communications" (HPC; C), and the U.S. Department of Defense has also listed supercomputing as one of the "key technologies for scientific research in the 21st century." In this alone, the investment has reached 1.7 billion US dollars. In order to ensure the successful development of teraflop and exascale high-performance supercomputers from 1995 to 2000, the U.S. Department of Defense is also preparing to allocate US$2.1 billion to support the on-time completion of this research task. If this plan is successfully completed, it will increase the total national economic output of the United States by 200 to 300 billion US dollars in the next ten years. nbsp; Japan is not far behind. They are extremely concerned about the development of terascale supercomputers in the United States. The computer industry has reacted very strongly and actively advocates the use of huge investments three times that of the United States, concentrating manpower, material resources, and financial resources to develop high-tech foundations. Construction of facilities (including 10 supercomputer centers). Based on the strong voice of the intellectual class and the computer industry, the Japanese government formulated a national policy in 1992 of direct national leadership and unified command, organizing relevant government departments, computer industry manufacturers, and institutions of higher learning to jointly conduct research, fully share results, and comprehensively develop. Large-scale parallel computers were listed as the country's key development projects in the 1990s. nbsp; Based on this national policy, the Japanese government formulated the ten-year "Real World Computer Project" (referred to as the RWC Project), two of which are plans to develop terascale supercomputers. The Japanese computer industry is ambitious and attempts to seize the world leadership of supercomputer hegemony from the Americans. nbsp; Western Europe also has a good foundation for the research on parallel processing technology and the development of parallel computer products. In particular, Germany, Britain and France attach great importance to the development of parallel computer systems, and formulated the "TeraFlop Plan" in 1991 (that is, the development of parallel computer systems). Terascale massively parallel computer), aiming to launch a terascale supercomputer within 5 years. nbsp; Practice in the past five years has shown that in order to realize a terascale super supercomputer, it must be a parallel machine, that is, only a large-scale parallel processor can do the job. The traditional vector multi-processing system is not feasible. This is because the speed of a single CPU is always restricted by physical limits, and its performance is always limited. Even if a multi-processor structure is adopted, its tight coupling will inevitably restrict the performance of the microprocessor. The quantity ultimately leads to limited system performance and the inability to overcome trillion- and exascale-level difficulties. Therefore, only parallel machines can climb the terascale level and initiate the historical mission of the computer industry. nbsp; 2. Hot spots and development trends in the field of parallel computersnbsp; 1. The rise of highly parallelized models of vector processorsnbsp; In recent years, many famous supercomputer manufacturers in the United States and Japan have developed traditional vector supercomputer technology and Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) technology combines comprehensive processing techniques to improve system performance. The vector processor is highly parallelized, which can not only maintain compatibility with previous traditional vector supercomputer software, but also greatly improve the system computing speed. For example, CRAY-YMP series of Craynbsp; Research Company, VPP500 developed by Fujitsu Company of Japan, etc.

nbsp; People in the industry are paying great attention to this model, and it has caused some products to switch to this model, increasing the type, grade and quantity of parallel machine products, thereby expanding competitors in the parallel field and increasing competitiveness. nbsp; 2. The Unix operating system will unify standardsnbsp; In September 1995, led by IBM and HP in the United States, and more than 50 well-known computer manufacturers from Europe, Japan and other countries in the world formed an alliance to jointly agree on the standard for the Unix operating system . nbsp; Many versions of the Unix operating system have been widely used in supercomputers, workstations and even desktop computers. At present, there are more than 25 major versions of Unix systems, making the work of programmers very complicated, because they must first figure out which platform the software is compiled for. nbsp; After the unification of Unix operating system standards, the new generation of Unix will be suitable for 64-bit microprocessors, which is more powerful than the current 32-bit microprocessors and is more convenient for host users of all levels. nbsp; 3. The U.S. and Japanese governments have redefined supercomputersnbsp; What level of performance can a computer be called a supercomputer? The U.S. and Japanese governments have revised their definitions several times for this reason. This is because computer performance has greatly improved in recent years. Amplitude increased. The United States and Japan agreed to define the performance of supercomputers as 5Gflops (i.e. 5 billion floating point operations per second) starting from April 1, 1995, and from 1990 to March 1995, it was defined as 300MFlops, nbsp; 1990 Years ago it was defined as 100Mflops. nbsp; The main purpose of the US and Japanese governments to revise the definition of supercomputers is to facilitate government procurement