Compaq Computer Corp. was recently awarded a multimillion-dollar supercomputing
contract in Australia after an earlier contract with Sun Microsystems Inc. for
the same project was terminated late last year because Sun's high-end servers
failed acceptance tests.

In mid-February, the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) announced
that it had selected Compaq to provide supercomputing technology for large-scale
scientific and engineering research in areas such as molecular modeling and
fluid dynamics.

Under terms of the three-year deal, Compaq will supply APAC with a 450-processor
Alphaserver SC system that, when fully installed, will rank among the most powerful
systems in Australia, according to APAC.

APAC is a partnership of seven organizations involving most Australian universities
and CSIRO Australia, the country's largest scientific and industrial research
agency.

APAC's decision to use Compaq equipment came after it abandoned an earlier
decision to use Sun servers because the systems failed to meet acceptable standards
for the project, said John O'Callaghan, executive director of Canberra, Australia-based
APAC, in an e-mail.

"The acceptance tests were done as part of the installation of the system
-- and were a condition of payment," O'Callaghan said.

"The contract with Sun was terminated because their system failed the
acceptance tests." O'Callaghan didn't specify how they failed.

Sun won the original $5 million, three-year APAC contract last August. It called
for Sun to commission a 200-GFLOPS system in September, comprising a cluster
of four E10000 servers.

The mainframelike E10000 is Sun's highest-end server and has been responsible
for powering much of the company's impressive growth in the enterprise server
arena during the past few years.

The deal called for the system to have been progressively upgraded by mid-2002
to a 1-TFLOPS system based on Sun's new UltraSPARC III processor technology.

In a statement at the time, Sun claimed that the installation would set "unprecedented
standards in total computing power for Australia." Sun also claimed that
the size and complexity of the data computations involved in APAC's work gave
it an "excellent opportunity to demonstrate the robustness and scalability
of the Sun system."

The deal was scrapped by early November, however, and the four Sun E10000 servers
that had been installed were returned.

"After the termination, we went back to the market with a request for
proposal," O'Callaghan said. "Compaq was awarded the contract based
on a number of criteria, including price/performance."

What is unclear is whether the original deal was terminated because Sun's systems
simply failed to meet required performance benchmarks or because of reliability
issues, said Terry Shannon, editor of "Shannon Knows Compaq," an Ashland,
Massachusetts-based newsletter.

Sun has been quietly battling a defective memory component on its UltraSPARC
II processors for more than two years. The defect has caused frequent reboots
and server crashes at dozens of Sun sites.

» posted by ITworld staff

Computerworld

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