AEROSPACE

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has placed an advance order for the company's upcoming product based on the Sandia "Red Storm" supercomputer. PSC has been utilizing AlphaServer systems named LeMieux, Rachel and Jonas from HP. This is the first disclosed customer for the new product line from Cray, which will be launched later this year. Financial terms were not revealed. Cray plans to deliver a "Red Storm" system in third-quarter 2004 to PSC's Pittsburgh facility. PSC will provide scientists with early access to the system's advanced massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and will also collaborate with Cray on specialized applications and other advanced software development. "This advance order from PSC, one of the world's leading supercomputing sites, is an important milestone for the 'Red Storm' product," said Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "It is hard evidence of the high interest level we are seeing in this innovative architecture." PSC Scientific Co-director and University of Pittsburgh Professor Ralph Roskies stated, "This new architecture will make possible major scientific breakthroughs by enabling important applications which couldn't scale well using clusters with today's weaker inter-node interconnect technologies." "We are very excited to, once again, work with Cray to advance the state-of-the-art in high-end scientific computing," said Michael Levine, PSC's scientific director from Carnegie Mellon University. "Together, we will deploy a system of exquisite balance and prodigious capability." PSC, in partnership with Cray, has consistently had early access to the most powerful new computing resources designed to solve important scientific problems. Supercomputing veteran and PSC's Director of Special Projects Jim Kasdorf added, "Cray's new product, made openly available to the U.S. research community by PSC, will significantly increase the competitiveness of our nation's scientists and high-performance computing industry." "Red Storm" is a 40-TeraOps (40 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer Cray is scheduled to deliver this year to Sandia National Laboratories under a $93 million Department of Energy contract. Cray announced plans to develop the Red Storm-based product in October 2003.