Control Data Corporation (CDC), IBM’s much smaller competitor, built a machine in the 1960s that was ten times faster than anything else on the market and was a huge success, selling in total for over US$800 million dollars. How is it possible that IBM lost such prestigious and important contracts in the supercomputing market to Cray, a company that has only one hundredth of IBM’s US$6.2 billion annual R&D budget? Is the company that brought computers to the world no longer able to build the fastest machines?Ĭompetitors have eaten IBM’s lunch before. And on October 29 Cray announced it had won a contract with the British Meteorological Office to build a £97 million supercomputer. July 10 followed with an even more important announcement from Cray: it had been awarded a US$174 million contract by the National Nuclear Security Administration to run computations for managing the US nuclear arsenal. On June 25 th, it also won a US$54 million supercomputer contract with the Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA), which will be the computer that prepares future South Korean weather forecasts. Tenders this large only happen a few times a year and attract the entire supercomputing industry.Ģ014 turned out to be a good year for Cray. The computer is likely to become one of the world’s fastest when it is delivered in 2016. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) with their next supercomputer. Last April, Cray Inc., a smaller rival of IBM in the supercomputing industry, won a US$70 million bid for supplying the U.S. But the company’s earnings just one week later also remind us of IBM’s yo-yo-like fortunes in the supercomputing business. Such a machine reminds us that IBM still has the strength to create powerful hardware. It was five years in the making, costing US$1 billion in development and is built on 500 patents. Geared for processing 2.5 billion mobile transactions a day, the z13 is the most powerful piece of hardware out there for enabling mobile payments and analysing customer data in real time. Two weeks ago, the tech media was abuzz with news of the z13, IBM’s newest “mainframe” supercomputer”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |