Silicon Graphics wins defense contract
Tuesday February 18, 9:00 am ET
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb 18 (Reuters) - Computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc. (NYSE:SGI - News) on Tuesday said it won the bulk of a U.S. Defense Department (News - Websites) contract worth $26 million to upgrade supercomputers at four military research facilities.
Silicon Graphics, of Mountain View, California, said the General Services Administration issued an initial contract on behalf of the defense department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program.
The contract will provide defense researchers with beefed-up computer processing power and memory to help analyze increasingly complex battle-planning scenarios, virtual flight simulation and weather forecasting.
Four of the department's high-performance computing centers will install the company's systems, and the contract will cover hardware, software, services and technical support.
A company spokeswoman said the deal will most likely result in additional government deals spread out over the next 42 months.
Silicon Graphics said it beat out its main competitors, including Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - News), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ - News) and Cray Inc. (NasdaqNM:CRAY - News).
Under the contract, Silicon Graphics will supply the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio with four supercomputers, each sporting 512 processor chips.
The machines will be capable of sharing as much as one trillion bits of memory simultaneously, allowing for massive simultaneous calculations on a scale that a conventional business computer could not handle, the company said.
Other facilities include the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center at Vicksburg, Mississippi; Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey, California, where atmospheric forecasting is done; and the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Patuxent River, Maryland.
The Naval Air Warfare Center will use the new computer systems to help support the Joint Strike Fighter weapon system to train pilots immersed in a realistic synthetic battlespace, the company said.
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