SKY Computers to Build Air Force's Fastest Computer; $3 Million Rugged SKYchannel System Capable of Performing at 256 GFLOPS

Business Wire, Sept 10, 1998

CHELMSFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 10, 1998--SKY Computers, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of Analogic Corporation today announced that it will supply a $3 million, 256 GFLOP computer to the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, NY. The 384 processor, rugged SKYchannel system has been purchased as part of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The HPCMP is investing $1.237 billion through the year 2003 to provide world-class High Performance Computing (HPC) technology for enhancing U.S. military advantage.

Dr. Richard Linderman leads the activities of the Signal/Image Processing area for HPCMP. Dr. Linderman indicated, "According to the TOP 500 list of supercomputers in the world (http://www.top500.org/top500.list.html), this will be the most powerful computer in the U.S. Air Force and approximately number 20 in the world. SKY demonstrated that it can exceed our price/performance requirements and meet our delivery using standard off-the-shelf components. The compute power of SKY's Excalibur board combines with the SKYchannel crossbar switching fabric and system software to deliver excellent performance on key benchmarks for signal and image processing."

The Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome Research site purchased the SKYchannel system as a next-generation, real-time signal and image processor for the development and testing of future embedded parallel algorithms supporting major defense command and control projects. It will be a resource shared among the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy for algorithm development, real-time implementation, and field demonstration. The DoD-wide community of Signal/Image Processing researchers will use the system to process data from sensors including radar, sonar, visible light, infrared, and communications. The techniques applied will range from synthetic aperture radar, synthetic aperture sonar, and space-time adaptive processing, to automatic target recognition.

SKY Computers anticipates that this will be the first of several HPC contracts that will provide significant growth for the company in 1999. Complete information on SKY Computers is available at www.sky.com.

SKY Computers, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Analogic Corporation, provides scalable multiprocessing solutions for real time applications. Modular families of embedded systems provide performance approaching the teraflop mark. SKY simplifies development by providing a complete set of software development tools designed for easy integration. SKY is the only company in its market segment that provides a three-year hardware warranty on its products.

SKY Computers, Inc., SKYchannel, and Excalibur, are trademarks of SKY Computers, Inc.

    CONTACT: SKY Computers, Inc.   Gray and Rice Public Relations
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