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Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial

Posted by Zonk on from the bidding-is-just-another-super-element dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."

3 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Because... by mr_beanz · · Score: 5, Funny

    No-one ever got fired for buying IBM!

  2. The DOE bit by StealthyRoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know that having one of the machines at Oak Ridge is that big of a deal. One simple explanation is that the NSF is going to share time on the mainframe with the DoE, and in exchange, the DoE foots the energy bills and finds a place to put it. I'd rather have the agencies sharing multi-million dollar computers than buying them and not using them to capacity.

  3. Unnecessary by fan+of+lem · · Score: 5, Funny

    Aw c'mon, we all know it will only output 42.