Cray tips its hand in $200M petaflops bid

摘要

San Jose, Calif. — Cray Inc. has tipped details of its road map through 2010 as it prepares a strategic bid for a $200+ million government contract to build a petaflops computer. The troubled supercomputer icon's plans shine a light on the future of high-end systems and suggest that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. may keep ahead of Intel Corp. in server CPU design for the rest of the decade. Cray described Cascade, a cluster-in-a-box planned for 2010 that will deliver a mix of scalar, FPGA and hybrid vector/massively multithreaded processors. The Cascade plan will vie with proposals from IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to win funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).