Subsidising industry’s research and development costs is a very unfashionable thing for a government to do these days, but the US Advanced Research Projects Agency is pumping $3.6m into Sunnyvale, California-based MasPar Computer Corp to enable the company to see through to the finish a three-year project to extend its scalable parallel system up to 262,144 processors and provide sustained TeraOPS performance. Under the contract, MasPar will increase the number of processors available to work on a single application by a factor of 16 from the current 16,384. The Agency has also bought the largest current configuration of MasPar’s machine, with 4Gb of processor data memory using 16M-bit chips, and wants it for solving very large defence problems. The system is valued at $4m, but it is not clear that that was what was paid for it. The 16,384-CPU system is claimed to be capable of delivering 68,000 MIPS and 6.3 GFLOPS, and supports 66Gb of RAID storage.
