APPLICATIONS

SEATTLE--Cray Inc. today announced that it, together with New Technology Endeavors, Inc., a wholly-owned Cray subsidiary, have signed an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in the second phase of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems Program. The program will provide Cray and its university research partners with $49.9 million in additional funding over the next three years to support the company's advanced research program aimed at developing a commercially available system capable of sustained performance in excess of one petaflops (a million billion calculations per second). DARPA formed the High Productivity Computing Systems Program to foster development of the next generation of high productivity computing systems for both the national security and industrial user communities. Program goals are for these systems to be more broadly applicable, much easier to program and more resistant to failure than currently available high performance computing systems. Five computer-makers, including Cray, were selected for the first phase concept study that was initiated in mid-2002, and all five firms submitted proposals for the second phase. Cray, along with IBM and Sun Microsystems, were selected to continue to the second phase, where further definition and validation of the proposed systems will occur. In mid-2006, DARPA plans to select up to two vendors for the final phase, a full-scale development phase with initial prototype deliveries scheduled for 2010. Cray's team is led by Burton Smith, Cray's chief scientist, and includes research partners from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, headed by Dr. Thomas Sterling; Stanford University, headed by Dr. William Dally; and The University of Notre Dame, headed by Dr. Peter Kogge. "Cray is very pleased to advance to the second phase of the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems Program," said James Rottsolk, Cray's chairman and chief executive officer. "DARPA funding greatly enhances our ability to pursue advanced, innovative research and development on future-generation systems. The selection of Cray is testimony to the ground-breaking ideas generated by Cray and our university partners. This is another step toward achieving our previously stated goal of delivering a sustained petaflops system by 2010."