APPLICATIONS

Altair Engineering announced today the long-term extension and broadening of their OEM agreement with Cray Inc. Under the new seven-year agreement, Cray will continue to bundle Altair's PBS Pro Grid computing technology with its current Cray X1 supercomputer product line. In addition, PBS Pro will be bundled with the successor Cray X1E product, Cray's upcoming Red Storm-based product, the Cray XD1 supercomputer and future-generation products. The Cray X1E system is a substantial upgrade to the Cray X1 system that will push high-bandwidth computing to a new price/performance level. Red Storm is a 40-TeraOps (40 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer that Cray is scheduled to deliver this year to Sandia National Laboratories under a $93 million Department of Energy contract. The Red Storm-based product is an Opteron/Linux system that targets the need for highly scalable microprocessor- based supercomputers with high bandwidth. The Cray XD1 supercomputer, priced from under $100,000 (U.S. list), is an Opteron/Linux system for the entry- level and midrange HPC markets. PBS Pro enables customers in the government, life sciences, energy, research, logistics, manufacturing and financial industries to optimize the utilization of their high performance computing environments by aggregating computation resources into a virtual pool and intelligently scheduling their computational workload across this virtual pool. Engineers and scientists who utilize PBS Pro are more productive because they can focus their attention on their analyses and are relieved of the need to remember various application and operating specific job control languages. "Altair and Cray have developed an excellent working relationship over the past three years and we are pleased to extend this OEM agreement to include our next-generation products," said Wayne Margotto, engineering manager at Cray. "Cray selected PBS Pro for its ability to meet our demanding requirements for scalability while providing the reliability and resiliency features needed in these demanding environments." "Cray has been a great partner and working with Cray has helped Altair better understand and evolve our products for very large complex environments," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair Engineering's Enterprise Computing Business Unit. "We are excited to extend our OEM agreement and look forward to being a part of the success of Cray's Red Storm product."