Nice when Uncle Sam pays for your research and development in a possibly crucial market for the future: the US Department of Energy has awarded Intel Corp a $45m contract to help develop a supercomputer that may eliminate the need for physically testing nuclear weapons. Intel will work with its Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, to develop within two years a computer 10 times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers. The parallel processor will presumably use an array of Intel’s P6 microprocessors. The Energy Department said the computer will be used by its three nuclear weapons laboratories as part of a programme to use high-performance computation to assure safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile without tests, adding that Intel was selected via a competitive process. The contract is the first in a series of such deals, it said.
