With over 3000 systems installed, the RS/6000 SP is doing phenomenally well in both technical and commercial high performance computing environments. These environments are evolving to bring together simulation and modelling, visualisation, database management, data mining, and network computing. The presentation will highlight the architecture and design principles that make the RS/6000 SP a truly general purpose parallel computer and indicate how this architecture will evolve in the future to satisfy user requirements in an unprecedented manner.