Data processing in high energy physics and vector processing computers

The data handling done in high energy physics in order to extract the results from the large volumes of data collected in typical experiments is a very large consumer of computing capacity. More than 70 vector processing computers have now been installed and many fields of applications have been tried on such computers as the ILLIAC IV, the TI ASC, the CDC STAR-100 and more recently on the CRAY-1, the CDC Cyber 205, the ICL DAP and the CRAY X-MP. This paper attempts to analyze the reasons for the lack of use of these computers in processing results from high energy physics experiments. Little work has been done to look at the possible vectorisation of the large codes in this field, but the motivation to apply vector processing computers in high energy physics data handling may be increasing as the gap between the scalar performance and the vector performance offered by large computers available on the market widens