Posted on 11/25/2006 10:45:01 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 21 — The Pentagon awarded almost $500 million in contracts to I.B.M. and Cray Inc. on Tuesday to design a supercomputer several times as fast as today’s most powerful systems.
The Cray contract is for $250 million and the I.B.M. contract is for $244 million, to be spent during the next four years. They prevailed over Sun Microsystems.
The contracts are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program being led by the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. The program aims to achieve and surpass the ability to calculate more than a quadrillion mathematical operations per second — a milestone known as a petaflop.
The ultimate goal is to reach two to four petaflops. The prototype systems for which Cray and I.B.M. were awarded contracts are to attain speeds of at least a quarter of that goal.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Damn! You're right.
I'll just have the Vogons cover up my mistake.
Afford, yes......maintain? Maybe, but proprietary hardware so I doubt it'll be so easy. Calling it a "supercomputer", however, is a travesty.....and I'm in that business.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.