AEROSPACE

SEATTLE, WA -- Supercomputer Provider Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) announced this evening the Cray SX-6 Series of high-performance, high-efficiency supercomputers. The new supercomputers are scheduled for limited availability by the end of 2001, with general availability in the first quarter of 2002. U.S. list pricing starts at well under $1 million. A re-branding of the NEC SX-6 Series announced separately today, the Cray SX-6 Series will be among the world's most powerful supercomputers for challenging industrial, academic and civilian government research applications, and will be unrivaled for certain classes of problems, company officials said. Targeted industry sectors include automotive, aerospace, weather and environmental, and petroleum research. The Cray SX-6 Series will also be available to all civilian U.S. federal agencies and approved federal contractors under the SEWP III contract awarded to the team of Cray Inc. and Government Micro Resources, Inc., in August 2001. This marks the first time that NEC supercomputers will be available for sale in the United States, thanks to the lifting of import duties earlier this year and the signing of a long-term OEM agreement that gives Cray exclusive rights to distribute and service NEC vector supercomputers in North America, and non-exclusive rights in most other areas of the world. Cray SX-6 supercomputers feature blazing speeds of up to eight trillion calculations per second (teraflops); exceptional price/performance; a balanced, robust hardware/software architecture enabling far-higher efficiency (sustained-to-peak performance ratio) and ease-of-administration than today's microprocessor-based supercomputers; and major technical advances. Peak performance is eight gigaflops (billions of calculations/second) per single-chip processor, 64 gigaflops per node, and eight teraflops (trillions of calculations/second) for the largest configuration. The new product line offers shared memory of up to 64 gigabytes per node, memory bandwidth of up to 256 gigabytes/second per node, and an I/O (input/output) bandwidth of 6.4 gigabytes/second per node. "The greatest strength of the Cray SX-6 Series is a balanced, robust architecture that is consistent with our own design philosophy," said Jim Rottsolk, chairman of Cray Inc. "It's this balance that enables supercomputers from companies like Cray and NEC to deliver a high fraction of theoretical 'peak performance,' versus a small fraction for other vendors. Peak performance is nearly meaningless in practice-actual, sustained performance is what customers ought to be paying for." Users of the predecessor NEC SX-5 Series system have reported sustained performance averaging more than 50 percent (up to 85 percent) of theoretical peak performance for large, diverse workloads, compared with the typical five percent to 15 percent efficiency for large microprocessor-based supercomputers. According to Rich Partridge, vice president, Enterprise Servers, with market research firm D.H. Brown, "The SX-6 supercomputer series from NEC and Cray is a major technical achievement that promises to deliver unrivaled sustained performance on a substantial range of challenging scientific and industrial problems. The SX-6 should be especially welcome in the U.S., where the unavailability of high-bandwidth supercomputers with powerful individual processors has prompted researchers to complain about lost leadership in some key fields." Professor Victor Alessandrini, Director of IDRIS, France's leading national supercomputing center, said: "The NEC SX-5 cluster in operation at IDRIS is currently the biggest NEC vector platform outside Japan. This system provides huge sustained performance-between two and seven gigaflops per processor-to more than 200 different scientific applications. It constitutes an outstanding national scientific instrument for French basic research." "We provide HPC capabilities for technical simulations in science and industry. Our automotive and aerospace users simulate all aspects of complex products. The only way to achieve required performance levels is by using leading-edge vector processors," said Dr. Alfred Geiger, T-Systems, debis Systemhaus. "The SX-5 is the only system on the market that offers the memory bandwidth and the sustained performance on the single processor that is necessary to solve the problems of our customers." A December 2000 report commissioned by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) noted: "Shared-memory vector computers manufactured in Japan have a combination of usability and performance that gives them far more capability than [distributed memory] computers available to U.S. scientists ... Parallel computers manufactured in the U.S., often with distributed memory, are difficult to use. In addition, there are intrinsic limitations to the ability of climate-science algorithms to achieve high levels of performance on these computers." "During the four years when it was part of SGI, Cray Research was not permitted to develop new high-end supercomputer products," said Rottsolk. "This was particularly hard on the most-demanding set of U.S. customers, who were not allowed to buy from Japan, the only other source of efficient high-end supercomputers. With the Cray SX-6 and our Cray-designed products now in development, we will significantly expand the choices available to the global high-end market." "IDC sees this announcement as positive news for North American HPC users in that it provides them with a strong alternative at the high-end of HPC," said Mike Swenson, senior research analyst, IDC. "Users have found that their problems are often very diverse and hence require different computer designs for different types of problems. A large shared memory vector computer at a lower price point may fit the requirements of many HPC users." Cray Inc.'s current supercomputer products include the Cray SV1(tm), named "Best Supercomputer" for 2001 by the readership of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine, and the Cray T3E(tm) massively parallel system, which set the world record for sustained performance on a real application. Products now in development are the Cray SV1ex(tm) supercomputer, the revolutionary Cray MTA-2 supercomputer, and the Cray SV2(tm) Series, an extreme-performance supercomputer on schedule for availability in the second half of 2002. For further information visit www.cray.com