Sun dropped from Darpa supercomputer project

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) will continue to fund petaflop-class supercomputer projects at Cray and IBM but Sun Microsystems is out of the running.

Darpa, which funds computing and technological projects for the military, is to give $250m to Cray and $244m to IBM, the companies said. The funding will help them complete supercomputers capable of churning 10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or 10 petaflops. These computers will be used to simulate global climate changes or the spread of hypothetical epidemics.

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Ultimately, Darpa hopes the programme will result in a new generation of supercomputers by 2010.

Peter Ungaro, Cray's president and CEO said in a statement: "This is a great day for Cray and the worldwide supercomputing community."

Darpa, however, will no longer continue to fund the supercomputing project from Sun. It wasn't for lack of trying. Sun was trying to incorporate a number of innovative technologies into its supercomputer, such as proximity communication, which allows chips to communicate without wires.

Both Cray and IBM, however, have much more extensive histories in supercomputing. IBM's computers currently sit atop the supercomputer performance tables. Big Blue is also engaged in a wide variety of processor, communication and memory projects that it believes will boost supercomputers. At the University of Texas, for instance, IBM is trying to develop a chip that will churn one trillion calculations per second.

Michael Kanellos writes for CNET News.com