Recently industrial systems in the have been used for new application areas. The accumulated performance at industrial sites used in new application areas. The most dominant trend seen in Figure 7 and Figure 8 is the strong rise of database applications since mid 1995. These applications include on-line transaction processing as well as data mining. 7 Architectures used in different Application Areas It is also important to notice that industrial customers are buying not only systems with traditional architectures, such as the SGI PowerChallenge or Cray Triton, but MPP systems with distributed memory, such as the IBM SP2.
Distributed memory is no longer a hindrance to success in the commercial marketplace.
In Table 5 we see that only in the automotive industry vector processing is still dominating. MPP have replaced the vector systems. The different architectures used in industrial systems as of November 1996. The percentage of the different architectures installed at industrial sites based on system counts. The success of massively parallel systems in commercial environments is not bound to any special architecture.