Yoshiro Aihara, Hitachi, presented the architecture of SR8000 with its specific RISC processors including vector properties. The machine in Tokyo is running since March. Compass divides the loops to distribute and synchronize them. Greg Astfalk, Hewlett-Packard concentrated on RISC processors as the processors of choice, since they are more affordable and used in a broader than just technical market.
Applications suffer from parallelism, it requires a hard work.
For vectors there are still applications. Windows NT is fine for development, but needs to support a much larger scalability before it will become usable on larger SMPs. Unix is THE operating system for scientific computing. When Nastran and Oracle are on a system in large scale parallelism, then the utilization counts. We need parallel versions of Nastran and Oracle that utilize the parallel systems.