The birth of the second generation: the Hitachi S-820/80

The authors present a performance evaluation and comparison of the Hitachi S-820/80 supercomputer on a set of standard Fortran benchmark codes that range from simple kernels to fluid dynamics applications. They find that the S-820 is a great deal faster in vector mode than any other supercomputer they have measured, with almost twice the performance on highly vectorized codes than the fastest machine they have seen up to now, the NEC SX-2. In scalar mode, however, the S-820 is roughly even with the X-MP and the SX-2, with a slight advantage going to the SX-2 in the applications tested