It was news when Cray didn’t make an HPCS milestone (although as I pointed out was potentially a good thing for the company), so symmetry insists that it is news when they make one. Last week the company filed an update with the SEC that they’ve completed their next milestone on the DARPA project
On June 22, 2010, we were notified by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”) that we had completed Milestone 7 under our DARPA Phase III High Productivity Computing Systems program agreement. The milestone was for $12,000,000 and, based on our level of spending for DARPA-related work, we expect that all of the milestone amount will be credited against our research and development expenses in the second quarter of 2010 as part of this co-funding arrangement.
According to their Feb 16 SEC filing, Cray has another $12M milestone in 2010 (Milestone 8), 2 $12M milestones in 2011, and a $12M and $20M milestone in 2012. I went back and looked, and couldn’t find any recent current reports for IBM (the other vendor in the program) that mention HPCS.