Sun knocked out of DARPA supercomputer project

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News

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November 13, 2005

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will continue to fund petaflop-class supercomputer projects at Cray and IBM, but Sun Microsystems is out of the running.

DARPA, which funds computing and technological projects for the military, will give $250 million to Cray and $244 million to IBM, the companies said Tuesday. The funding will help them complete supercomputers capable of churning 10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or 10 petaflops. These computers will be used to simulate global climate changes or the spread of hypothetical epidemics.

Ultimately, DARPA hopes the program will result in a new generation of supercomputers by 2010.

The program started early in the decade when NEC's Earth Simulator was the most powerful computer on the planet, and some feared that the U.S. might lose its technical superiority in supercomputing. Inventions and ideas embodied in these machines often end up trickling down to servers and eventually PCs.

This is a great day for Cray and the worldwide supercomputing community," said Peter Ungaro, Cray's president and CEO in a prepared statement.

DARPA, however, will no longer continue to fund the supercomputing project from Sun. It wasn't for lack of trying. Sun was trying to incorporate a number of innovative technologies into its supercomputer, such as proximity communication, which allows chips to communicate without wires.

Both Cray and IBM, however, have much more extensive histories in supercomputing. IBM's computers currently sit atop the supercomputer performance tables. Big Blue is also engaged in a wide variety of processor, communication and memory projects that it believes will boost supercomputers. At the University of Texas, for instance, IBM is trying to develop a chip that will churn one trillion calculations a second.

See more CNET content tagged:
Cray Inc., supercomputer, supercomputing, Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp.

Add a Comment (Log in or register) 3 comments

Not surprising...

by chuck_whealton November 22, 2006 12:12 PM PST

It's not surprising, given their histories, that IBM and Cray would pull ahead on this one.

I imagine if the Alpha hadn't had a dagger punched through it by HP, it >COULD< be in the running as well.

Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com

Reply to this comment

Re: Not surprising...
by TCB_123 November 28, 2006 2:08 PM PST: Actually, you're incorrect..when DEC was bought out by Compaq, they went quickly down hill as that merger did not pan out as Compaq had hoped. HP only performed the final act of burial for the Alpha product line after they bought Compaq.

just my two cents,
Teresa

Not Surprising, Exactly.
by American 1st November 22, 2006 7:24 PM PST: The Feds waste so much money, time, and lives on the basis of sheer stupidity, like paying for MS Office when less-expensive, including free, options are available. Knocking Sun out of the running just means that the Feds are simply backing Intel, period. Yet another Cover Thy Butt move by some bought and paid for bureaucrats and/or Generals. It would be funny if we weren't all paying the bills. As for Alpha, you're dreaming. It ran hotter than an overloaded diesel truck going uphill in Death Valley in July. Wake up! DEC is dead and gone.; Reply to this comment

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