Incumbent SGI is the company to beat in the bidding. Though in the midst of financial difficulties, SGI won an earlier contract for LANL's current fastest machine, Blue Mountain, and SGI and LANL employees worked hard to transfer the nuclear weapons simulation software from the older Cray supercomputers to the newer SGI system. MacKay dismissed the issue of rewriting the software for a new computer architecture, saying the software is all custom-written anyway. They're going to rewrite all that stuff from scratch or 'port' it. They don't care.
Port is an industry expression for transfer.
It was also a major step up from two years ago, when it had none. Sun's machines, usually found at banks, insurance companies and telecommunications firms, are all based on the E10000 design it acquired from Cray Research. Earlier predictions that Sun would have half the systems on the supercomputer list by 2000 might well not come true yet, MacKay said. IBM, which has won contracts for lesser machines at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , isn't a bidder in the race for the 30-teraflop machine, the company has said. In the nuclear weapons program, the Energy Department expects to fund two even more powerful systems after the 30-teraflop machine, officials have said.