On Monday, microprocessor giant Intel Corp has signed a multi-year contract with supercomputer maker Cray Inc.; the goal of this collaboration is to develop a new range of HPC systems and technologies. A specific launch date hasn’t been officially made public yet, but the first Intel-Cray supercomputers are expected to be ready around 2010 – 2011 and there is a high chance that they will pack post-Nehalem processors and Larrabee floating-point accelerators.

Nowadays, a constantly growing demand for supercomputers can be noticed and it does not show any sings of slowing down. The machines are used by government agencies for a wide range of operations, as well as by universities and private companies. These computers were given the "super" prefix as their are clearly superior to regular ones; they work on hundreds or even thousands of "multicore" chips, each coming with two to four calculating engines. Future generations of such computers will undoubtedly have more chips packing even more processors. According to Peter Ungaro, Cray's chief executive, individual systems may reach a million brains in two years’ time. As he said, "the world is changing," and there is no way of saying where this technology’s evolution will go from here on out.

As Mr. Ungaro stated, one of the priorities of the newly established alliance will be a computer, scheduled for release in 2012 ("Cascade"), that has been developed by Cray Inc. under a grant from U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.