SUPRENUM

It was a major effort which was aimed at developing a national expertise in massively parallel processing both at hardware and at software level.

The final team consisted of about 15 groups from different institutions all over Germany, including several large companies as well as the small SUPRENUM Supercomputer GmbH.

[1] They were[3] The tasks were assigned the following:[2] While the research group on parallel numerical methods in Sankt Augustin provided the know-how for the applications (solving partial differential equations), the German Society for Mathematics and Data Processing GMD FIRST (German: Forschungszentrums für Innovative Rechnersysteme und -technologie, English: Research centre for innovative computer systems and technologies) in Berlin, provided the necessary know-how in hardware and operating system design.

In contrast to the then ubiquitous, conventional vector computers (e.g. NEC SX architecture, Cray Y-MP), SUPRENUM-1 pursued as one of the first a massively parallel design.

[9] The high bandwidth of the bus network made the Suprenum-1 an interesting machine for a wide range of applications, including those requiring long-range communication.

SUPRENUM software was characterized by the best support for scientific applications to be found among the various distributed memory MIMD vendors.

The effort invested in development of libraries of high-level grid and communication primitives greatly eased the effort of moving applications to the computer, and also provides substantial high-level portability to other systems, since the communication library could be implemented in terms of low level primitives on any distributed system.

PEACE was designed from the start to support efficient low-latency message passing as weIl as multitasking.

In contrast to the above-mentioned FORTRAN compiler, PARMACS programming model is explicitly based on Message Passing.

The table[12] below provides a comparison of the Suprenum-1 with other MPP systems of its time: Because of the high development cost of more than 160 million[13] Deutsche Mark and the lack of success in marketing, the project has been increasingly evaluated critically and compared with other unsuccessful research (Breeder reactor, Transrapid).

Therefore, the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology waived the funding of the planned second phase of evolving into a commercial project.

The participating institutions had acquired a well-respected expertise in parallel computing, which resulted in a European project GENESIS.

The SUPRENUM project has spun off many successful enterprises, e.g. GENESIS, SUPERB, Pallas GmbH, Manna, PPPE and RAPS.

The GMD FIRST project Manna is similarly a continuation of the operating system and some of the architecture aspects of SUPRENUM, again very successful, although this time in a research environment.