APPLICATIONS

Cray Inc. today announced that the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has ordered a Cray X1 supercomputer and a Cray XD1 high-performance computing system. Financial terms were not disclosed. An air-cooled Cray X1 supercomputer will be installed in the third quarter at OSC's new data center facility in Springfield, Ohio. The system will support scientific researchers throughout Ohio and beyond, especially in the fields of chemistry, materials science and life science. A Cray XD1 system is also scheduled to be installed in the third quarter at OSC-Springfield. The Cray XD1 system will be used for scientific research and to exploit the system's reconfigurable computing capability. "We are very excited about making Cray's advanced high-performance computing tools available to Ohio's scientific research community and our other users. These resources will help make important contributions to our economy and quality of life," said OSC Executive Director Stan Ahalt. "OSC is grateful to the Department of Energy's ASCI program and to U.S. Representative Dave Hobson for the strong support that made this possible." According to Kevin Wohlever, director of OSC's Springfield operations, "With the addition of these two state-of-the-art Cray systems, OSC's high-performance computing resources will be among the most powerful and exciting in the nation. I look forward to seeing the scientific advances they will help make possible." Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk said, "OSC is a prestigious scientific center and a long-standing customer of ours. It is exciting for Cray that OSC is making our newest systems available to its broad scientific user base. The Cray X1 system is the world's most powerful supercomputer product and our Cray XD1 system is going to enable revolutionary breakthroughs that aren't possible on similarly priced cluster products." Overall customer-reported scores for the Cray X1(TM) supercomputer system were the best for any high-performance computing (HPC) system on the new U.S. government-sponsored HPC Challenge benchmark tests, Rottsolk said. The Cray XD1 system strongly exploits high volume technologies such as AMD HyperTransport(TM) technology and Opteron(TM) processors, as well as the Linux operating system, while innovating with a high performance system interconnect known as RapidArray(TM), an automated management infrastructure, and the opportunity to accelerate application performance through the use of field programmable gate arrays. Development of the renamed Cray XD1 system has continued within Cray since the company acquired OctigaBay Systems and its workforce in April 2004. OSC is Ohio's high performance computing and networking center. Established in 1987 by the Ohio Board of Regents, the Center provides scientific computing, networking, educational outreach, and information technology resources to state and national high performance computing and networking groups. OSC empowers its academic, industrial, and government partners to make Ohio the education and technology state of the future. More information on OSC can be found at www.osc.edu. Cray's mission is to be the premier provider of high performance computing for its customers' most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Go to www.cray.com for more information about the company.