Giants Vie in Shrinking Supercomputer Market : Technology: The method for crunching data and the buyer--academia or industry--influence the high stakes contest.

Take one desktop computer. Dump numbers into it as fast as you can, and the machine gobbles them up. Now string dozens of desktops together. It’s a feeding frenzy called a supercomputer.

Intel Corp. is trying to translate that concept into a new product that can build on Intel’s world dominance as the leading manufacturer of microprocessor chips for desktop computers.

Standing in its way are competitors such as IBM, three Japanese electronics giants, Silicon Graphics and the Minnesota company that for years has been the unrivaled leader in supercomputer development: Cray Research.

Each company is using one of two basic approaches to building supercomputers: stringing chips together to share one central memory core, or stringing chips together and giving each its own separate memory.

The first approach is called symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, and the second is known as massively parallel processing, or MPP.

The big difference is that SMP supercomputers can grow only so big. In theory, there is no limit to the size of massively parallel machines because each microprocessor carries its own memory.

“At some point, as you keep adding processors in the SMP design, efficiency declines because they’re all trying to get into the same memory,” said Wendy Vittori of Intel.

Based at an office rising from the farmland just west of Portland, she is operations director for the Intel scalable systems division, the latest name for the Santa Clara company’s decade-long supercomputer project.

“The main role of the supercomputer in the ‘big picture’ is primarily to do simulations of physical events, anywhere you have complex physical phenomena,” Vittori said.

Those “events” include global climate modeling, oil and gas exploration, earthquake analysis, weather forecasting, medical imaging, aircraft design, mapping the entire human genome, and even peeking at the origins of the universe.

They are the tasks that Cray Research began building supercomputers to handle when the main customers were universities, the military and the government. But things have changed since 1976, when Cray delivered its first supercomputer.

“It’s a market that’s shrinking mainly because of government contractors declining with the end of the Cold War and the ‘Evil Empire,’ ” said Steve Conway, chief spokesman for Cray, based in the Minneapolis suburb of Eagan, Minn.

Cray still dominates sales of supercomputers costing more than $5 million, with 71% of the 1994 market, said Gary Smaby, founder of the Smaby Group, a Minneapolis computer marketing research firm.

Cray also holds 35% of the $1 million to $5 million market, with Intel, IBM and the three main Japanese supercomputer makers, Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC, all fighting for second place in the 5% to 15% range.

But in the rapidly emerging market for small supercomputers in the $100,000 to $1 million range, the leader by far is Silicon Graphics of Mountain Lake, with more than a third of the market share. Cray has only a tiny slice of the pie.

Howard Richmond, an analyst with the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn., says Silicon Graphics has grabbed a large share in a fairly short time because it offers relatively low prices for reliable SMP machines that run on proven software.

The combination not only appeals to researchers and engineering companies, but it also appeals to commercial customers, such as retail chains and banks.

“The issue is how you make money with technology,” Richmond said. “Follow the money. It’s in industry, never in universities and government.”

Willy Shih, marketing director for Silicon Graphics’ supercomputer division, says the company has exploited the supply of cheap computer chips and its own experience in computer graphics software to build SMP machines that operate more efficiently than more expensive competitors.

“It’s a classic case of a computer company using lower-cost technology to deliver solutions that in a sense provide very much the same function as the ‘big box,’ ” Shih said. “Because it’s more affordable, you attract more mainstream users.”

Sales of massively parallel machines have lagged behind symmetric multiprocessor computers partly because nobody has developed software that takes advantage of the design.

“Parallel processing is software intensive, and the key to getting it to work is the software,” said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, head of IBM Power Parallel Division in Somers, N.Y.

IBM and Intel are battling each other in the high- and mid-range of the supercomputer market, holding roughly equal market shares.

But IBM is busily courting commercial customers while Intel remains focused on the scientific and university market.

“The only reason they were selling anything was that government and academics were buying for laboratories,” Richmond, the Connecticut-based analyst, said of Intel. “They’re good at components. But if it takes more than a couple pieces of silicon, they’re out of their league.”