Intel Corp has now finished developing the supercomputer it has been working on for the US Department of Energy, and claims it is capable of delivering one TeraFLOPS, breaking the previous claimed record of 368 GigaFLOPS of Hitachi Ltd in 1995. The Intel machine – an array of Pentium Pros – will be used at the government’s Sandia National Laboratory to simulate performance of US nuclear weapons, replacing live tests of weapon stockpiles. There are also plans to use it to predict weather changes and natural disasters and in other Energy Department projects requiring simulation of series of events. The machine integrates 9,624 Pentium Pro chips – though it’s said to be only 7,264 processors as yet. The Energy Department will pay Intel about $50m for it under terms of the September 1995 contract.
