IBM and Cray will design supercomputers for DARPA

Big Blue, Cray has "outdone" Sun Microsystems to win government contracts worth $ 494 million to design a new generation of supercomputers.

On November 21, 2006, the US Defense Research Agency (DARPA) decided to give IBM and Cray four-year contracts to design a supercomputer 100 times stronger than the most powerful supercomputers currently available. Now there is a simple program, management and use.

Contract of Cray worth $ 250 million, of IBM worth $ 244 million. It is expected that by 2010 each company will offer its supercomputer prototype.

These contracts are part of DARPA's High Performance Calculation Systems (HPCS) program. HPCS was published in 2002 with the aim of creating systems capable of performing 2-4 petaflops (1 petaflop = 1 million billion calculations per second). The fastest supercomputer today is IBM BlueGene with a speed of 360,000 billion calculations per second.

In addition to developing supercomputing prototypes, IBM and Cray also have the task of building programming tools that can speed up application writing by 10 times the tools available when the HPCS program started.