HITAC S-3000

The HITAC S-3000 was a family of vector supercomputers that Hitachi developed, manufactured and marketed, announced in April 1992 as the successor to the HITAC S-820. The family had two parts. The low-end and mid-range S-3600 models were an improved S-820 built in more modern semiconductor technology, while the high-end S-3800 models were a new design: a parallel vector processor that supported one to four vector processors. Unlike Hitachi's earlier supercomputers, the S-3000 family was marketed outside Japan. Its CPU architecture was based on IBM System/370 and was compatible with Hitachi's mainframe systems, and it supported two operating systems, OSF/1 Unix and Hitachi's own VOS3, a fork of IBM MVS. In 1994 the family gained a massively parallel companion, the SR2001, which used superscalar microprocessors, and Hitachi later gave up vector supercomputers in favour of that approach. The S-3000 family was replaced in 2000 by the SR8000, which made it Hitachi's last vector supercomputer.