In a surprise move, AT&T Co has entered the civil supercomputer market in Japan with a machine developed for the US military that executes one of the standard Pentagon instruction sets, Reuters reports from Tokyo. The machine, the AN/UYS-2, is rated at 1.44GFLOPS peak, which puts it into competition with the single processor Cray X-MP models and the air-cooled models of the Control Data ETA-10 – but at around $2m, the price is highly competitive. AT&T’s partner on the venture is Sumitomo Corp, and the pair hope to sell an ambitious 150 of the boxes over five years.
