The first scientific supercomputer out of Concurrent Computer Corp’s Supercomputing Solutions Inc new 50-50 joint venture with General Microelectronics Corp is due out in January. The Capps machine is described as a 32-node 64-bit parallel supercomputer rated at 800MFLOPS and will be offered with C and Fortran compilers as well as assembler. The machine was developed and is manufactured by General Microelectronics, but will be marketed by the San Diego joint venture. Two eight-node production models have already been shipped to Northrop Corp for computational fluid dynamics work, and a third has been accepted by TRW Inc. Capps is pitched at structure testing, computational chemistry, electromagnetic analysis and large scale simulation. The contribution of Concurrent Computer Corp to the new Supercomputing Solutions Inc, which was formed in March (CI No 1,131) is its Navier-Stokes supercomputer, which was conceived at Princeton University. Once development work on that is complete, the new firm will be in the same position as was Cray Research Inc until it decided to spin Seymour and the Cray-3 out into a separare company, having two competing lines of supercomputers to market and support, although the general adoption of Unix in the supercomputing world alleviates that problem.
