IBM and Cray won the tender to design the new generation of supercomputers

The agency of the US Department of Defense for Advanced Research (DARPA) announced that the two companies won a four-year contract to design a computer that would be 250 times faster than the fastest computers today? Cray won a contract of about 244 million dollars, while IBM won a contract of XNUMX million dollars? The computers are designed for national security, science and industry applications

 
The companies IBM and Cray beat the Sun company and won a major tender of the American government to design a new generation of supercomputers. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced last Tuesday that the two companies won a four-year contract to design a computer that would be XNUMX times faster than the fastest computers today - and would be easier to program, maintain and use. Sun reached the final stage of the tender, but lost to the other two companies. Sun intends to integrate the technology it developed as part of the preparations for the tender into its other product lines - said the company's spokeswoman.

Cray won a contract of about 250 million dollars, while IBM won a contract of 244 million dollars. The development of the prototypes of the new supercomputers will be completed by 2010. The computers are intended for national security, scientific and industrial applications, and will be developed within a program launched in 2002, for the development of computers that operate at a rate of two to four peta-flops (a peta-flop is equal to one thousand trillion calculations per second ). The fastest supercomputer today is IBM's Blue Gene, which operates at a rate of 360 teraflops (a teraflop is equal to a trillion calculations per second).