For the first time since anyone can remember, a contract to build a supercomputer has gone to a chip vendor instead of a systems vendor. The Department of Energy announced a $200 million contract on Thursday for Intel, not IBM, HP, or an HPC systems vendor, to build a 180 petaFLOP supercomputer.

Intel, of course, does not make systems. That task will be assigned to Cray as a subcontractor, which has racked up its share of HPC systems in recent years. On the November 2014 Top 500 supercomputer list, Cray had 62 systems on the list, including the number two system, Titan, a 27 petaFLOP machine powered by AMD Opteron and Nvidia K20c processors.

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