Thinking Machines Corp, the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm that specialises in massively parallel supercomputers using very simple custom processors, has been awarded a $12m contract by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to try to develop the first machine to operate at up to 1,000 GFLOPS – but don’t look for it any time soon. Danny Hillis, co-founder and chief scientist, says that the thing will have as many as 1m processors, will cost $80m to develop to production, and won’t hit the streets until the mid-1990s. The US contract requires it only to deliver a scaled-down version of the new system, in 1992; Thinking Machines will al-so invest $12m in the project. The company has sold about 40 of its Connection Machines and expects the first order from Japan soon – turnover last year was $30m and it is growing at 50% or more. Its second gen-eration CM2 machine uses 64,000 processors.
