First, the introduction nbsp; 2 1 century will be a century of high information, and 2 1 century will be a century of computerization. In the computer family, supercomputer (or supercomputer) is the peak of the development of computing technology, which concentrates the essence of modern high technology, so it is internationally recognized that supercomputer technology and its supercomputer products are the symbol of a country's comprehensive national strength. Experts believe that in the 2 1 century, supercomputers will be the key factor to decide who can take the lead in economy and science and technology. The US Department of Defense once claimed that "supercomputers are the pinnacle of computing technology. If the research and development of supercomputers lag behind foreign countries, national security will be threatened. "The United States, Japan and Western European countries have launched a fierce battle around supercomputers, that is, supercomputers of the order of trillions of times, and they all want to get there first and strike first. To this end, they each applied brilliant ideas to organize manpower, material resources and financial resources, and formulated a five-year or ten-year plan for the development of supercomputers. The American government has formulated "Supercomputer and Communication" (HPCamp; C) development plan, the U.S. Department of Defense also listed supercomputing as one of the "key technologies in scientific research in 2 1 century", and this alone will cost1700 million dollars. In order to ensure the successful development of high-performance supercomputers in the order of trillions and trillions of times from1995 to 2000, the U.S. Department of Defense is also going to allocate 2 1 billion dollars to support the timely completion of this research task. If this plan is successfully completed, it will increase the gross national product of the United States in the next decade by 200-300 billion US dollars. nbsp; Japan is not far behind. They are extremely concerned about the development of trillion-order supercomputers in the United States, and the computer industry has reacted strongly. They actively advocate using huge investment three times that of the United States to concentrate manpower, material resources and financial resources to develop high-tech infrastructure (including 10 supercomputer center). Based on the strong voice of the intellectual class and the computer industry, the Japanese government formulated the national policy of direct national leadership and unified command, and organized relevant government departments, computer manufacturers and institutions of higher learning to conduct joint research, share the achievements and develop them in an all-round way in 1992, and listed large-scale parallel computers as the key development projects of the country in the 1990s. nbsp; Based on this national policy, the Japanese government has formulated a ten-year "Real World Computer Plan" (RWC Plan for short), two of which are plans to develop trillions of supercomputers. The Japanese computer industry is ambitious, trying to seize the world leadership of the supercomputer hegemony from the Americans. nbsp; Western Europe also has a good foundation for the research of parallel processing technology and the development of parallel computer products, especially Germany, Britain and France attach great importance to the development of parallel computer systems, and formulated the "TeraFlop Plan" in 199 1 year, aiming to launch trillion-order supercomputers in five years. nbsp; The practice in the past five years shows that the non-parallel model is the only one to realize the trillion-order supercomputer, that is, only large-scale parallel processors can be competent. The traditional vector multiprocessing system is not feasible, because the speed of a single CPU is always restricted by the physical limit, and its performance is always limited. Even if the multiprocessor structure is adopted, the number of microprocessors will be restricted because of its tight coupling, which will eventually lead to the limited system performance and the inability to overcome the difficulties of trillions and trillions of times. Therefore, only parallel machines can take on the task of climbing trillions of times and provoke the historical mission of the computer industry. nbsp; Second, the hotspots and development trends in the field of parallel machinenbsp; 1. The rise of highly parallel mode of vector processor nbsp; In recent years, many famous supercomputer manufacturers in the United States and Japan have developed a comprehensive processing technology that combines traditional vector supercomputer technology and large-scale parallel processing (MPP) technology to improve the performance of the system. The vector processor is highly parallelized, which can not only maintain the compatibility with the traditional vector supercomputer software, but also greatly improve the system operation speed. For example, Craynbsp; CRAY-YMP series of Research Company, VPP500 developed by Fujitsu Company of Japan, etc. nbsp; People in the industry are extremely concerned about this model, and some products have turned to this model, increasing the types, grades and quantities of parallel machine products, thus expanding competitors in the parallel field and increasing their competitiveness. nbsp; 2.Unix operating system will unify standardnbsp; 1September, 1995, led by IBM and HP in the United States, more than 50 famous computer manufacturers in Europe, Japan and other countries formed an alliance, and * * * agreed on the standard of Unix operating system. nbsp; Many versions of Unix operating system have been widely used in supercomputers, workstations and even desktops. At present, there are more than 25 major versions of Unix system, which makes the work of programmers very complicated, because they must first figure out which platform to program software for. nbsp; After the unification of Unix operating system standards, the new generation of Unix will be suitable for 64-bit microprocessors, which are more powerful than the current 32-bit microprocessors and convenient for host users of all levels. nbsp; 3. The American and Japanese governments have redefined the supercomputer. What level of performance can a computer be called a supercomputer? For this reason, the American and Japanese governments have revised its definition several times, because the computer performance has been greatly improved in recent years. As agreed by the United States and Japan, from 1 April 19951day, the performance of supercomputers is defined as 5Gflops (that is, 5 billion floating-point operations per second), while 1990 to1March 1995 is defined as 300 mflops. 1990 was defined as 100Mflops before. nbsp; The main purpose of modifying the definition of supercomputer by the American and Japanese governments is to facilitate the government's adoption.