Amdahl Corp has abandoned its efforts to market Fujitsu Ltd’s VP scientific supercomputers after selling no more than a dozen of the machines, most of them in Europe – but that will not necessarily be the end of the company’s efforts in supercomputers. It seems that the reason Amdahl paid $30m for Key Computer Laboratories in February – at the time it said only that it was interested in Key’s Unix and ECL technology – is that Key has been developing a supercomputer to run under Unix, and according to Electronic News, Amdahl is hoping that the work will lead to a product that it can announce by the end of next year. According to the US trade weekly, the aim of the project is to develop a machine that would have comparable single processor vector performance and three times the scalar performance of the Cray Y-MP, and configurable up to eight processors. Amdahl declines comment on the work going on at Key, and was non-commital when Electronic News asked up it would be taking the new top-end VP2000 supercomputer from Fujitsu – but it earlier told our US associate Technology News of America Co that it definitely would not.
