Sun Microsystems Inc has scored the biggest computer industry coup so far in the former Soviet Union, hiring the man that developed the supercomputer used in the Soviet space programme, Boris Babayan, and his 50-strong team of hardware and software engineers and having them work for the company from Moscow. Sun will also get their services for a song, paying only the sorts of salaries that the members of the team were earning before the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to the New York Times, the big attraction for Sun is that while Mr Babayan’s latest machine, the 16-processor Elbrus III, is built of primitive Soviet circuitry, architectural and software advances mean it should run at up to 10 GFLOPS. Sun hopes to apply the skills of the Russian team to developing more powerful versions of Sparc RISCs.
