Cray Products Rank High On Top500 Processor Speed Test

SEATTLE, WA -- Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today said its supercomputers again were among the largest and fastest in the latest independent list of the world's "Top500 Supercomputer Sites," which ranks supercomputer systems according to their theoretical processor speeds. In the theoretical test, the average Cray system on the list ranked second among major vendors at 578.8 processors and a theoretical speed of 361.1 billion calculations per second (gigaflops). Aggregate theoretical processor speed for the 39 Cray systems listed was 14.1 trillion calculations per second (teraflops). Cray was first at U.S. government classified sites, providing fully 58 percent of the theoretical processor speed in that category. Cray officials said they are looking forward to the results of a new, more-comprehensive test from market research firm IDC. IDC plans to issue results for its "Balanced Rating Benchmark" next week at SC2001, the annual conference of the high-performance computing community. The IDC Balanced Rating Benchmark supplements the Linpack test that is the basis for the "Top500" list by evaluating computer systems on their scalability and memory system capabilities, as well as their processor performance. The "Top500 Supercomputing Sites" list is compiled and published by Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee; Hans Meuer, University of Mannheim (Germany); and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon from the NERSC organization at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The list can be viewed at www.top500.org