IBM, Cray win DARPA supercomputer contracts
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(InfoWorld) - IBM and Cray have beat out Sun Microsystems to win sizable U.S government contracts to design a new generation supercomputer. On Tuesday the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded the two companies four-year contracts to design a supercomputer that is 100 times more powerful than today's most powerful systems, yet is simpler to program, administer and use. Cray's contract is valued at $250 million and IBM's is worth $244 million. Each company is expected to have a prototype supercomputer ready by 2010. The contracts were awarded as part of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program, which is targeted at the national security community, science and industrial sectors. Launched in 2002, its goal is to develop a system capable of performing calculations at the rate of two to four petaflop per second. A petaflop is one quadrillion (one thousand trillion) calculations per second. "Flop" stands for floating-point operations. TheÂ fastest supercomputer in operationÂ today, an IBM BlueGene system, operates at 360 teraflops, or 360 trillion calculations per second. Sun Microsystems, which had been funded in earlier rounds of the contract, lost out on the latest round. However the company still plans to integrate the technology it had been developing into its product lines, a Sun spokeswoman said. Besides developing prototypes of the supercomputers, IBM and Cray are also tasked with building programming tools that speed the time it takes to write applications tenfold compared with what was possible when the HPCS program began. DARPA says the ultimate goal of the project is to create a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems that can be sold to national security and high-end industrial users. Federal agencies likely to use the supercomputers will include the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Agency.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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IBM  and supercomputer-maker  Cray Inc.  are being awarded a total of nearly $500  million by a Pentagon research agency for a supercomputer  project, and Cray shares rose 31 percent on Wednesday.
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The United States grabbed top honors in the race for the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer, beating out the Japanese computer that has held the title for more than two years.
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TOKYO - NEC Corp. has begun marketing the SX-8, its latest entry in the supercomputer sweepstakes. The vector supercomputer features peak processing performance of 65 teraflops, which according to NEC tops rival IBM Corp.
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Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a $1 billion contract to an industry team led by Northrop Grumman Corp. to build three robotic reconnaissance aircraft and a computer operating system to help fly them for the Air ...
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IBM has claimed that its Blue Gene/L supercomputer has edged out rival NEC&#39;s Earth Simulator to become the world&#39;s most powerful supercomputer.
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com September 29, 2004, 1:04 PM PT. IBM claimed first place Wednesday in a supercomputer speed competition with an expanded version of its Blue Gene/L that beat out a Japanese machine from NEC.
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The first official benchmark test results for Intel's Tigerton series and AMD's Barcelona series were released by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. From a pure prowess perspective, neither the new quad-core Xeon MPs nor the new quad-core Opterons walk away with an all-around victory, with Intel's X7350 stealing the show in integer throughput, and AMD's 8350 winning the race in floating-point throughput.
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The Department of Energy awarded I.B.M. a contract to build a supercomputer using chips designed for the coming PlayStation 3.
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IBM, a while back, showcased its supercomputer, Blue Gene/L, at Top 500 supercomputer contest. At that time, the company was behind in performance by a Japanese firmâs supercomputer that managed to take away the first place crown.
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IBM has won a long-term contract from Honeywell worth several hundred million dollars, its largest military/aerospace engineering contract since IBM exited the field a decade ago, it said on Monday.
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Hector, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resource, was made by U.S. manufacturer Cray Inc. and offers the power of 12,000 desktop PCs.
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Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power everything from video game consoles to business computers.
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IBM Corp. has been tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy to build a $35 million supercomputer that could be used to monitor and maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
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[Technology India]: London, Nov 8 : A new supercomputer being constructed by IBM has broken all supercomputing records after demonstrating double the power of the long-reigning supercomputing champion, NEC&#39;s Earth Simulator, based at Yokohama, Japan.
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This supercomputer deal is about more than speed.
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene/L, which is being installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recaptured the supercomputer speed record that Silicon Graphics' (NYSE: SGI) Columbia system at NASA held for barely a week.