The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI, [2]) was started to ensure that the US would stay at the fore-front of developing high-performance computing systems. The initiative was taken by some of the large DOE national laboratories: Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore.
Three vendors have been awarded contracts to develop systems that should deliver speeds of 10--30 Tflop/s at the application level by 1999--2001 and 100 Tflop/s by 2003--2004. One of the objectives is to use commercial off-the-shelve components for lower costs and an easier spin-off to systems that can be commercialised.
We shortly describe each of the projects for sofar as the information provided by the parties involved has substance.