Fujitsu Ltd is already the most successful of Japan’s Big Three in supercomputers, but the company is not satisfied, and in what sounds like bad news for Cray Research Inc, it is cutting prices on its supercomputers by 20% to 30% to increase competitiveness on a price-performance basis with other domestic and foreign manufacturers. The move was made possible by falling prices for components, the company said, but is intended to improve Fujitsu’s position in bidding for government procurement of supercomputers. Japan’s stimulative supplementary budget, passed in June, provides for purchase of 11 supercomputers this fiscal.The price cuts affect 12 models of the VPX series and 10 models of the innovative VPP500 series of vector parallel processors.
