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DARPA Awards HPC Contracts To IBM, Cray, Not Sun
snedecor writes "DARPA has awarded a third round of funding for the next-generation petascale computing system. IBM and Cray roughly split the $494M, while Sun, with little track record, received none. This is in spite of Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication."
Google's advances are very far from traditional HPC applications like fluid dynamics, weather forcasting, solid body simulations, waveguides, thermal reactions, particle dispersion, oil discovery, etc. Google does data mining, and transactional processing. The very problem that the darpa HPCS program addresses, is that the bulk of the HPC systems sold in the US are just clusters of off-the-sheld database/web-optimized servers. It turns out that these clusters don't deliver very high levels of efficiency, either computationally, or from a power/cooling perspective. Google rolls their own servers, but they still fit into the database/web-optimized server camp. Their software acheivements are all in the data-mining category.
This is not to say that the defense department doesn't need lots of high-end database servers. They use them by the truckload. However, the need for advances in this area are being met by the hardware and software markets. Market forces were not, however, stimulating truly interesting research at the high end of the HPC marketplace. Thus the DoD needed to put together this competition.
Since these machines have a "doubtful" application besides the DARPA contract, I think that it may be better for these companies to invest on research more related to their product or may-be products.
You may want to rethink that. The number of products developed out of DARPA initiatives which have become mainstream are astounding. For now, yes, they may be specialized devices, but the research driven by these funding sources is responsible for home technology 10 years from now. Just because you can't see a use for it, doesn't mean it won't affect you.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
It's Niagara
Niagara II (T2) has one floating point unit per core...so for a T2 outfit with all cores, eight FPUs.