Two-year-old Seattle, Washington parallel supercomputer start-up Tera Computer Co has won more than kind looks from the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Agency is translating its interest into hard cash, putting up $7.5m to help fund the development of the company’s first machine. Tera has a new approach to massively parallel processing and hopes to have a prototype delivering 300 GFLOPS ready during 1993 (CI No 1,215).Tera expects complete development of the prototype system to cost about $30m: it is to be a 64-bit, shared-memory parallel computer with a family of models incorporating up to 256 processors. Each processor will have a peak performance in excess of 1 GIPS and 1 GFLOPS. Tera claims that its shared-memory architecture will make it easier to develop software for parallel processing.