SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY

Active Memory Technology Inc., an Irvine manufacturer of high-speed computers known as parallel processors, said the U.S. Army has purchased one of its computers for use in an experimental project that involves detecting mine fields from an aircraft.

AMT said the order with the Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Miss., is valued at about $360,000.

AMT said the Army is studying how well mine fields can be detected from the air. Under the contract, one of AMT’s DAP 610 computers will be mounted in a helicopter and used to process data received from an airborne scanner.

If the experiment is successful, AMT is hopeful that the Army will go ahead with full development of a mine detection system using AMT equipment, a company spokesman said.

The Irvine firm manufactures parallel computers that use hundreds or thousands of small processors to perform computer tasks at very high speed.