APPLICATIONS

SEATTLE--Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced that it has signed an agreement with the U.S. government to pursue the development of next-generation supercomputer technologies. The agreement calls for Cray and the government to each invest $17.5 million over the next two years. "Last year we signed a development agreement calling for $10 million each of investment by the government and Cray for memory and processor enhancements to the Cray X1(TM) system, leading to what we refer to as the Cray X1e(TM) system, and for helping to develop a successor system to the Cray X1 and Cray X1e system, which we have code-named our Black Widow system," said Jim Rottsolk, Cray chairman and chief executive officer. "This new contract increases the commitment of each party by an additional $17.5 million, and reflects the Government's ongoing commitment to U.S. supercomputing leadership," added Rottsolk. "The objective of this program is to produce supercomputer technologies that support superior memory bandwidth performance, stride independent memory bandwidth, instruction level parallelism and power efficiency. "The development of these systems advances our previously described product roadmap," Rottsolk added. "The Cray X1e system will increase peak performance from about 50 teraflops today to about 150 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). With continued funding, we expect the successor Black Widow system to reach a peak performance of several hundred teraflop in its initial design, and to exceed a petaflop (a thousand trillion calculations per second) in its product lifetime. "We are very gratified for the strong support of Congressmen David Obey, Martin Olav Sabo and Norm Dicks in furthering this key public-private partnership.