Compaq has won a contract with the US department of energy worth $150 million to build a superdupercomputer which will simulate nuclear explosions.

According to esteemed organ The Wall Street Journal, the machine, which uses a number of Alpha microprocessors, is the second major win for Compaq, beating off competition from both Sun and IBM.

The Big Q machine will bash out something like 30 teraflops a sec, and will be installed at the Los Alamos centre.

When Compaq turned in its last set of financial results, CEO Michael Capellos forecast future wins for AlphaServer technology.

Unfortunately, Compaq no longer supports Windows NT on Alpha platforms but instead is focusing its sales efforts on using the chip in systems that run Tru64 Unix, Linux, Open VMS et al. ®