Compaq takes supercomputer lead

Forget these Willamettes and Itania, these Athlon Powers and these Durons.

Compaq has just announced that it has won a deal to deliver an Alpha-based supercomputer to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre which will deliver six teraflops when installation is complete next year.

That's a staggering six trillion operations a second.

The machine, which is intended to boost US computing capability in the non-military sector, will use 2,728 Alphas in 682 nodes, and that will be worth a cool $36 million to the Big Q, according to a report in the New York Times.

The newspaper reports that the machine will have six times the power of the fastest non-military computer, and follows tenders from Compaq competitors, including Big Blue and Intel.

Earlier this year, the first rough draft of the human genome project was successfully completed, in part using Alpha microprocessors.

Michael Capellas, Q's CEO, said when the firm delivered its second quarter figures last month, that he expected several design wins using Alpha technology over the next year, some of which will be based on the server technology formerly known as Wildfire.

There is a European connection to the Terascale machine. Bristol based Quadrics is supplying the design interconnect for the machine. ®