IBM bags Pentagon's computer contract

The Pentagon awarded almost $500 million in contracts to IBM and Cray on Tuesday to design a supercomputer several times as fast as today's most powerful systems. The Cray contract is for $250 million and the IBM contract is for $244 million, to be spent during the next four years.

They prevailed over Sun Microsystems. The contracts are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program being led by the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.

The programme aims to achieve and surpass the ability to calculate more than a quadrillion mathematical operations per second — a milestone known as a petaflop. The ultimate goal is to reach two to four petaflops. The prototype systems for which Cray and IBM were awarded contracts are to attain speeds of at least a quarter of that goal.