Introduction: Supercomputers in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Since the installation of the electronic computers ENIAC in Pennsylvania in 1946 and G1 in Goettingen 1950, the importance of computers for engineering and the natural sciences has grown continuously. In the same period, owing to improvements in technology and architecture, the performance rate of serial von Neumann computers has increased to several Million Floating Point Operations per Second (MFLOPS). However, since 1969 with the CDC-7600, no substantial increase in performance has been achieved for serial computers with conventional von Neumann architecture. The VLSI-technology (Very Large Scale Integrated circuits with more than 260000 transistors on one chip) is nearly fully developed. Future technologies such as GAAS (Gallium-Arsenid) or the super-conductive Josephson-Junction will cause an improvement in speed by a factor of about 10 to 20 but are not yet at our disposal.