Europe Strikes Back

The IBM Seminar on Parallel Computing took place in Rome at the IBM European Center for Scientific and Engineering Computing in March 1982. The subject, as stressed already, was very up to date and the seminar attracted many Italian researchers and professionals. On the IBM side the organizers were Giorgio Sommi, the Director of the Center, and Piero Sguazzero, an expert on scientific computing on IBM vector machines. Traditionally IBM was the main provider of computing power especially for the communities interested in scientific computing (physicists, mathematicians, biologists) and they wanted to maintain their role in front of other providers of supercomputing facilities that were starting to compete (such as for example Silicon Graphics, founded in 1982), making clever use of technological advances such as pipelining the execution of instructions or extending the computer power with specialized processors (a mathematical processor or a graphic processor).