No system has yet appeared which has been recognized by the high performance computing community as the guidepost for massively parallel processing. This paper discribes what is necessary for a system to became such a guidepost. A comparison is made to the CRAY-1 a system which serves as a guidepost to vector computing, and indeed serves as a standard by wich all types of high performance computing systems are measured. It is claimed that establishing an MPP guidepost requires budilding a system that delivers on the promised potential of scalable parallel computing by providing high sustained performance on a wide variety of production application with very little effort on the part of programmers