Despite turning up at the top of most lists of the largest installed bases of parallel processors, Intel Corp will stop taking orders for its 80860 RISC-based Paragon supercomputer at the end of September, reports HPCwire. It will continue to service and support users through 2001. The company will make smaller versions of the Paragon-based TeraFLOPS system it’s building for the US Department of Energy available, but only through third-party vendors. Intel started in the supercomputer business in 1984 with a group called iSC – Intel Scientific Computers. The systems used 80286 and 80386 processors. The iPSC/860 supercomputer came in 1990 and the multiple instruction- multiple data Paragon system at the end of 1992. From its experience in the supercomputer world, Intel was able to construct the Pentium-based Scalable Parallel Processor technology which it now offers to commercial massively parallel vendors. As Intel boss Andy Grove’s says, nothing in this business lasts forever.