“In what may be the first competitive government contract
involving the Linux operating system, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration last month tagged a Reston, Va.-based
company to provide a Linux-based supercomputer that promises
drastic improvements in the ability to forecast dangerous weather
patterns.”
“Under the terms of the $15 million contract, High Performance
Technologies Inc. will install the first large-scale cluster of
Compaq Computer Corp.’s XP1000 Alpha workstations running Linux at
NOAA’s Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.”
“According to NOAA officials, the cluster will involve 277
workstations capable of crunching 300 billion arithmetic operations
per second — a capability that is 20 times more powerful than the
lab’s current system. The cluster will represent one of the
most powerful computers in the world, they said.”