What, you’ve never heard of CRAY, INC? They make supercomputers. You know what a supercomputer is, right? It’s like if Jay-Z and Kanye West were computers and came together to make an album (or: one big computer) with guest appearances by people like Beyonce (or: the foremost computer scientists in the world) on it. And the supercomputer makers of CRAY Inc are seeing their stock rise by more than 10 percent in a single day. You know what that is? CRAY. So: Why’s it happening?
Via Forbes’ Eric Savitz:
The company this morning announced a $188 million multi-phase, multi-year contract from the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project. The deal will be for a Cray XE6 system and a future upgrade to the new XK6 system.
And directly from CRAY’s release:
Consisting of products and services, the multi-phase, multi-year contract is valued at $188 million. The Cray supercomputer will be installed in multiple phases over the first three quarters of 2012 at the University of Illinois’ National Petascale Computing Facility. The integrated XE6 and XK6 supercomputer will feature new 16-core AMD (NYSE: AMD – News) Opteron™ 6200 Series processors (formerly code-named “Interlagos”), a next-generation GPU from NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA – News), called “Kepler,” and a new integrated storage solution from Cray. Acceptance of the complete system is anticipated to occur in the fourth quarter of 2012.
And people, of course, are going…nuts.
Between this and the whole Buffett/IBM thing, apparently people are going nuts for supercomputers now. The world has already made this the year of the super rap album. Is this the moment of the supercomputer? And if that happens to be the case….you know what that is, right?
