Cray Research Inc, Eagan, Minnesota has stepped in to pick up the pieces at bankrupt Floating Point Systems Corp with a letter of intent to pay $3.25m for most of the assets of the Beaverton, Oregon company, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a week ago (CI No 1,777). The sale would include all assets except land and buildings, and accounts receivable owed to Floating Point. As well as approval by the boards of both companies, the agreement needs the approval of the US Bankruptcy Court in Portland, which is supervising the reorganisation of FPS. In its bankruptcy filing, Floating Point listed $18.5m in liabilities and nearly $31m in assets at book value, although it accepts that the current market and liquidation values of the assets are considerably less. Cray wrote to employees last week to say that it would decide whether FPS has the potential to support our ongoing network supercomputing objectives. The company’s flagship product is the 500 Series of ECL Sparc RISC-based machines, designed to integrate heterogeneous scalar, vector, parallel matrix and application-specific co-processors in a single machine (CI No 1,644). It offers symmetric multiprocessing under SunOS Unix and all or some of the processors can be applied to a single task. Cray is planning to develop a massively parallel supercomputer and has been evaluating RISCs, and clearly thinks that the Floating Point technology may shorten the design cycle. The letter of intent requires closing by November 15 unless Cray asks for an extension.
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