Japan Closing Gap in Supercomputers : But U.S. Experts Doubt Fujitsu’s Claim of Fastest Machine

BOSTON — The battle between Japan and the United States for the technological edge in the supercomputer market is heating up after Fujitsu Ltd.’s claim that it has the world’s fastest computer.

Several industry experts doubt the claim and say that, even if it is true, the next generation of supercomputers from Minneapolis-based Cray Research Corp. will not only be faster than the Fujitsu machine but available sooner.

Still, there are few doubts that Japanese manufacturers are catching up with the the Americans who invented the supercomputer, and the United States could lose its lead in three to five years if due diligence is not exercised.

More is at stake than the market for supercomputers, which industry analysts expect to grow from $1.6 billion now to $4 billion by 1992.

Supercomputers are essential tools for the most complex scientific research and for industrial design. Problems that once took months or years to solve can be handled in seconds, such as predicting worldwide weather patterns, simulating the flow of air over a jet or breaking codes.

29% of Market

Federal officials have often expressed the firm view that such research in the United States must not be dependent on Japanese machines, and the Department of Defense is even barred from buying any non-U.S. supercomputers.

In the five years since they entered the market, the three Japanese computer makers--Fujitsu, NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd.--have captured only 5% of the market outside Japan. Only one Japanese-built computer, an NEC SX-2, is installed in the United States, at the Houston Area Research Center.

However, analysts estimate that the Japanese vendors have 29% of the worldwide market anyway by virtue of having their own country locked up, another source of trade friction between Tokyo and Washington.

But Japan’s influential Ministry of International Trade and Industry has targeted the supercomputer industry and in 1982 launched a project aimed at creating a machine 100 times faster than existing supercomputers by 1990.

“Japan does present a very real threat,” said Lana Kartashev, president of the International Supercomputing Institute. “Most improvements in speed at this point only come from improvements in components technology, and Japan is very advanced in that area.”

Caution Urged

Fujitsu staked its claim to the world’s fastest computer last week when it announced that a single processor of its new VP-2000 can calculate at the rate of 4 billion floating-point operations (FLOPS) a second, which means that a single operation would take four-billionths of a second to complete.

One processor of Cray Research’s Y-MP, the most powerful computer now available, can process at about one-eighth the speed of the Fujitsu machine. However, analysts and computer scientists said the figure is misleading because the most powerful VP-2000 will have only two processors, while the Y-MP has eight working simultaneously.

“I would be very cautious about saying it’s the fastest supercomputer,” said Gordon Bell, vice president of research at Ardent Computer Corp. and a leading computer scientist. “The question of speed is very tricky, and it looks like Fujitsu is measuring in only one dimension.”

Most industry experts said the Fujitsu computer cannot be evenly compared to the Y-MP because it is not a multiprocessor machine, the accepted architecture for most U.S.-built machines.

“It is not unusual for vendors to make this kind of comparison, but it is somewhat misleading,” said Jeffrey Canin, computer analyst with Hambrecht & Quist who specializes in supercomputers.

“Everyone was expecting more than just a dual-processor machine from Fujitsu,” Canin said. “This announcement was much less impressive than expected.”