APPLICATIONS

DENVER, CO -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today previewed technologies for the Cray SV2(tm) Series, expected to be the world's most powerful supercomputer product. On schedule for availability in the second half of 2002, the Cray SV2 Series promises to dramatically extend the capabilities of supercomputers and contribute to advances in areas such as automotive design, aerospace engineering, weather and climate prediction, and academic research. The technology preview opened today and continues this week at SC2001, the annual conference of the high-performance computing industry. Cray SV2 supercomputers also are expected to support critical government applications, according to Cray Inc. president and CEO Michael P. Haydock. He said the company has been receiving significant financial development support for the Cray SV2 Series from several U.S. government agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA), which has called Cray SV2 development "absolutely essential to U.S. national security interests." Cray SV2 supercomputers are designed to apply unprecedented power to programs optimized for highly parallel microprocessor-based systems, such as Cray T3E(tm) systems and clustered systems from other vendors, as well as to programs optimized for vector supercomputer systems, according to Steve Scott, chief architect of the Cray SV2 system. "The methods of preparing code for the Cray SV2 system will be familiar to anyone who has programmed for either of these types of systems. Whenever there are opportunities for vectorization to extract additional performance from the code, the Cray SV2 compiler will perform this in a way that is transparent to the user," Scott said. "The theoretical peak performance of the Cray SV2 product line will be impressive, up to tens of teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) in the standard product," added Scott. "But peak performance is nearly meaningless in practice. The Cray SV2 Series will prove its true value in the actual, sustained performance it delivers to customers." Technical innovations in the Cray SV2 Series include: * Very dense component packaging, allowing system footprints for near-teraflop-sized systems to be as small as 4-by-7 feet. The major benefits of this extreme computational density are substantially faster processing, and cost savings in facility infrastructure and system maintenance. * Extremely powerful multi-streaming processors that provide flat, low-latency shared access to local node memory. Each multi-streaming processor can dynamically execute as four two-pipe processors or one eight-pipe processor, whichever best exploits the characteristics of the code being run. * Bandwidths on individual modules comparable to the bandwidths typically seen in entire, large competing HPC systems. * Spray-evaporative cooling, which effectively handles chip heat flux equivalent to that of the space shuttle tiles during atmospheric reentry. * Compliant interconnect, using 350 lbs. of force to engage 3,800 connections between the multi-chip module and the printed circuit board. * Power efficiency of 80 percent, delivering high reliability and performance in a tight package. * A single instance of the operating system that treats the whole machine as one system. Competing highly parallel systems often have inefficient replicated operating systems, i.e., a full copy of the operating system on each node. "We expect the Cray SV2 to deliver unrivaled applications performance in both established supercomputing markets and new markets, such as bioinformatics," said Vito Bongiorno, marketing manager for the Cray SV1(tm) and Cray SV2 products. "The Cray SV2 product will offer a more powerful version of the special CPU features first developed for the intelligence community and currently found in Cray SV1 systems." Details on pricing and system configurations will be disclosed at the time of the Cray SV2 product announcement in 2002, Bongiorno said. For more information visit www.cray.com