Seemingly proving itself the most versatile RISC architecture in the business, the MIPS Technologies Inc R-series is going to end up powering both two of the three leading games machines, and the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The Sony Corp Playstation uses a 32-bit MIPS core in its single-chip processor, the Nintendo Co Ltd N64 uses a 64-bit R4400-derived part – and now the US Department of Energy has given the Cray Research Inc arm of Silicon Graphics Inc a $110.5m contract for the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with 3,072 processors, to help the government – or rather its Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to determine whether aging US nuclear weapons systems are still safe and reliable, now that actual testing is verboten. A second system, about one-third the size, with 256 processors and also built by Cray, is also planned for Los Alamos and is expected to cost about $40m. This is for global ocean and atmosphere models, molecular biology, environmental and natural hazards and other non-weapons uses, although the two machines will also be usable in tandem, and is due in at the year-end. The monster 3TFLOPS machine is due in by December 1998. The two systems are to combine the MIPS microprocessors with clustered shared-memory programming techniques from Silicon Graphics.
