Since the former Control Data Corp dropped out of the supercomputer business, Cray Research Inc has pretty much had the weather forecasting computer business sewn up in the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, despite the best efforts of the Japanese. Now, in a stunning coup, Fujitsu Ltd has bounced Cray out of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Shenley Park, Reading, and will replace the vector Cray Y-MP C90/16 and parallel T3D with one of its VPP Vector Parallel Processing systems – an as yet unannounced model – which run under Fujitsu’s Unix System V.4-derived UXP/VPP. The current flagship VPP500 scales up to 222 processors, each rated at 1.6 GFLOPS, and the new one will presumably be much more powerful, although the original one is in Gallium Arsenide and BiCMOS while the new one is being built in CMOS. A low-end VPP300 model will go in in March for testing and conversion, and the top-end machine will follow in June. The Centre goes out to tender every time it replaces its computers and it appears that this time around, Fujitsu bid a price – รบ25m over five years – that Cray simply did not feel able to try to beat.
