When will the home version be available?

Scott points me to some cool news:

Seattle-based computer maker Cray is collaborating with Sandia National Laboratories here on a new, faster supercomputer - Red Storm - that will be seven times more powerful than the federal weapons lab's current supercomputer.

Red Storm, expected to go into operation sometime in fiscal year 2004, will have a theoretical peak performance of 40 trillion calculations per second.

Excellent. I didn't know Cray was still in business, what with Seymour Cray's death and all those advances using parallel PC processors. Nice to see they're still around and making headlines.

Here is the text of a speech Seymour Cray gave in 1996. Here is a slide show overview of the man and his computers. Here is a 1995 interview with Seymour Cray.

Sandia's Jim Tomkins and [Sandia's director of computers Bill] Camp were the architects of the Red Storm design, which Sandia said was strongly influenced by the successes of the Cray T3E and ASCI Red supercomputers.

Tomkins said Red Storm could be upgraded to 60 trillion calculations per second, and the system architecture is designed to scale up to hundreds of trillions of calculations per second.

Cray was just talking about cracking the teraflop (one trillion floating point operations per second) boundary in 1996. This machine will be fairly close to doing petaflops (1000 teraflops), something that Cray thought would be another 20 years off.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on October 22, 2002 to Technology, science, and math