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Cray wins British nuclear weapons deal

Cray has sold an XT3 supercomputer to the U.K.'s Atomic Weapons Establishment.

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Stephen Shankland principal writer
Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and writes about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
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  • I've been covering the technology industry for 24 years and was a science writer for five years before that. I've got deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and other dee
Stephen Shankland
Cray has sold an XT3 supercomputer worth more than $36 million to the , 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.