Supercomputer development stage company Tera Computer Co of Seattle has reported expenditure of $3.5m for the quarter to March 31 and only $10,400 in research funding to set against it. It says that building the prototype of its high- performance parallel Tera Multithreaded Architecture system cost almost $1.5m in the quarter and that these costs are expected to continue to be significant until the prototype is completed. It doesn’t say when that will be but says it has completed the system software and hardware design stage of the machine, which it believes will enable it to offer systems with several times the price-performance of current commercially available high-performance computer systems.
