The University of Texas’ Advanced Computing Center has been awarded a contract worth $59 million dollars to build a supercomputer based around Sun equipment:

TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 trillion bytes (terabytes) of memory and 1.7 quadrillion bytes (petabytes) of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire™ x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek™ disk and tape storage technologies, and will use over 13,000 of AMD’s forthcoming quad-core processors. It will be housed in TACC’s new building on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas.