>>For the first time in over twenty years of supercomputing history, a chipmaker [Intel] has been awarded the contract to build a leading-edge national computing resource.
That's bullshit. Multiple supercomputers were built for nuclear security that were constructed after 1995.
I worked at the San Diego Super Computer Center during this time period, and could get access to them to run computations occasionally. Kinda neat.
ASCI Red (1.3 teraflops) was built by Intel in 1997 at Sandia, upgraded to 2.4tf in 1999:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
ASCI Blue Pacific (3.9 teraflops) was built by IBM in 1998 at LLNL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
ASCI Blue Mountain (3.1 teraflops) was built by SGI in 1998 at Los Alamos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
ASCI Q (7.7 teraflops) replaced it in 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
ASCI White (12 teraflops) was an IBM box built in 2001 at LLNL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
ASCI Purple / ASC Purple (100 teraflops) replaced it in 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Red Storm (36 teraflops in 2005, 101 teraflops in 2006, 204 teraflops in 2008) was built by Cray at Sandia in 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Blue Gene (which are a whole line of supercomputers since the 90s continuing to the present day) have been built in different places, including Argonne and have hit 17 pflops and hold half the top10 list of supercomputers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I did some of my Master's thesis on the SDSC Blue Gene supercomputer. Good times.
But yeah, anyway, the article is factually wrong.