In the paper the various dichotomies are discussed and a rationale is provided for the decision to realize the SUPRENUM supercomputer, a large ‘number cruncher’ with 5 Gflops peak performance, in the form of a massively parallel MIMD/SIMD multicomputer architecture. In its present incorporation, SUPRENUM is configurable to up to 256 nodes, where each node is a pipeline vector machine with 20 Mflops peak performance, IEEE double precision. The crucial issues of such an architecture, which we consider the trendsetter for future numerical supercomputer architecture in general, are on the hardware side the need for a bottleneck-free interconnection structure as well as the highest possible node performance obtained with the highest possible packaging density, in order to accommodate a node on a single circuit board. On the side of the system software the design goal is to obtain an adequately high degree of operational safety and data security with minimum software overhead. On the side of the user an appropriate program development environment must be provided. Last but not least, the system must exhibit a high degree of fault tolerance, if for nothing else but for the sake of obtaining a sufficiently high MTBF.

In the paper a detailed discussion of the hardware and software architecture of the SUPRENUM supercomputer, whose design is based upon the considerations discussed, is presented. A largely bottleneck-free interconnection structure is accomplished in a hierarchical manner: the machine consists of up to 16 ‘clusters’, and each cluster consists of 16 working ‘nodes’ plus some organisational nodes. The node is accommodated on a single circuit board; its architecture is based on the principle of data structure architecture explained in the paper. SUPRENUM is strictly a message-based system; consequently, the local node operating system has been designed to handle a secured message exchange with a considerable degree of hardware support and with the lowest possible software overhead. SUPRENUM is organized as a distributed system—a prerequisite for the high degree of fault tolerance required; therefore, there exists no centralized global operating system. The paper concludes with an outlook on the performance limits of a future supercomputer architecture of the SUPRENUM type.