The US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories launched a $52m agreement with an industry group headed by Cray Research Inc to develop software to exploit massively parallel supercomputers: Cray and 15 other companies will work with the labs under the Industrial Computing Initiative, for which Uncle Sam is putting up half the money; other participants are Aluminum Co of America Inc, Amoco Oil Co, Arete Associates, AT&T Corp’s AT&T Bell Laboratories, Berea Inc, Biosym Technologies Inc, Boeing Co, Exxon Research & Engineering Co, Halliburton Co, General Motors Corp and its Hughes Aircraft unit, International Technology Corp, Olin Corp’s Rocket Research Co, Schlumberger Ltd’s Schlumberger-Doll Research, Thinking Machines Corp, and Xerox Corp; Cray said the programme includes 15 projects in the fields of environmental modelling, petroleum exploration, materials design, advanced manufacturing, and new massively parallel systems software; the company will contribute two 128-processor Cray T3D massively parallel systems on a cost-shared basis, one at each laboratory, which will be networked together for the development work.
