Cray wins British nuclear weapons deal

Cray has sold an XT3 supercomputer worth more than $36 million to the United Kingdom's Atomic Weapons Establishment, the company said Tuesday. The system, based on Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor and originally developed at Sandia National Laboratories' Red Storm project, will be delivered in the second quarter of 2006 and enter full production use by the end of the year.

"The new Cray supercomputer will enable us to explore even more complex mathematical models in three dimensions," said Brian Maskell, manager for future systems at AWE, in a statement. The machine's peak performance--typically a higher number than its sustained performance--will be 40 trillion calculations per second, Cray said. AWE is responsible for building and maintaining the country's nuclear weapons.