out of the running, verbose, assume

1.

Sun knocked out of DARPA supercomputer project

http://news.com.com/Sun+knocked+out+of+DARPA+supercomputer+project/2100-1010_3-6137770.html?tag=nefd.top

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will continue to fund petaflop-class supercomputer projects at Cray and IBM, but Sun Microsystems is out of the running.

DARPA, which funds computing and technological projects for the military, will give $250 million to Cray and $244 million to IBM, the companies said Tuesday. The funding will help them complete supercomputers capable of churning 10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or 10 petaflops. These computers will be used to simulate global climate changes or the spread of hypothetical epidemics.

Ultimately, DARPA hopes the program will result in a new generation of supercomputers by 2010.

The program started early in the decade when NEC's Earth Simulator was the most powerful computer on the planet, and some feared that the U.S. might lose its technical superiority in supercomputing. Inventions and ideas embodied in these machines often end up trickling down to servers and eventually PCs.

This is a great day for Cray and the worldwide supercomputing community," said Peter Ungaro, Cray's president and CEO in a prepared statement.

DARPA, however, will no longer continue to fund the supercomputing project from Sun. It wasn't for lack of trying. Sun was trying to incorporate a number of innovative technologies into its supercomputer, such as proximity communication, which allows chips to communicate without wires.

Both Cray and IBM, however, have much more extensive histories in supercomputing. IBM's computers currently sit atop the supercomputer performance tables. Big Blue is also engaged in a wide variety of processor, communication and memory projects that it believes will boost supercomputers. At the University of Texas, for instance, IBM is trying to develop a chip that will churn one trillion calculations a second.  

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency  高级防御研究计划机构

out of the running adv.不参加比赛, 没有赢的希望 be out of the running  vi.没有取胜的希望

trickle down  vt.从...上缓慢滴下

quadrillion n.千的五次方, 百万之四次方 adj.千之五次方的

peta  n.拍它,千兆兆

flop =FLoating Octal Point 浮点八进制

atop adv.在顶上;prep.在...的顶上

big blue  蓝色巨人(意指ＩＢＭ公司 美国国际商用机器公司的别称)

trillion num.万亿;adj.大量的

2.  verbose adj.详细的, 冗长的

3. Would create a hard link to myfile.txt in the current directory assuming that it is not public_html.

assuming that  假如