a megaflop and would eventually top out at 100 Megaflops making it as fast as 100 Inmos T414 transputers. Intel i860 add-in cards made it possible for as many as 20 Intel i860s to run in parallel and could be programmed using a software library similar to today's MPI libraries which today support distributed memory parallel processing in which servers sitting in 1U rack mount chassis that are essentially PCs provide the horsepower behind the majority of the world's supercomputers. This same approach could be employed using Hauppauge's motherboards connected by Gigabit Ethernet, something that was however first demonstrated using a wall of IBM RS/6000 PCs at the 1991 Supercomputing Conference. IBM's lead was quickly followed by academic users who realized they could do the same thing with much less expensive hardware by adapting their x86 PCs to run in parallel at first using a software library adapted from similar transputer libraries called PVM (parallel virtual machines) that would eventually morph into today's MPI. Products like the Intel i860 vector processor that could be employed both as a vector and graphics processor were end of life'd around 1993 at the same time that Intel introduced the Intel Pentium P5: a CISC processor that used CISC instructions that were pipelined into hard coded lower level RISC like primitives that provided the Pentium with a Superscalar architecture that also could execute the x87 FPU instruction set using a built in FPU that was essentially implemented using the scalar instructions of the i860 as well as a memory bus that provided a 400 MB/sec interface to memory that was borrowed from the i860 as well. This high speed bus played a crucial role in speeding up the most common floating point intensive applications that at this point in time used Gauss Elimination to solve simultaneous linear equations buy which today are solved using blocking and LU decomposition. The Intel Pentium, while good, did not provide enough floating point performance to compete with a 300 MHz DEC Alpha 21164 that provided 600 Megaflops in 1995. At the same point in time, Intel supercomputing had moved from the 50 MHz Intel i860XP that was six times slower than the Alpha 21164 to the special version of their Pentium that at 200 megaflops was only three times slower than the 21164. However, the impending speed upgrade of the Alpha to 600 MHz ultimately doomed the future