CLOUD

SEATTLE, WA -- Supercomputer provider Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) today announced that they are collaborating to develop advanced bioinformatics software applications for the life sciences. The NUS initiative is part of Cray's global collaboration program with leading bioinformatics research institutions. During the "BioEd2002" symposium held in Singapore, of which Cray is a key sponsor, an eight-processor Cray SV1(TM) supercomputer installed at the NUS Medical Faculty last month was officially unveiled. This resource, which is the most powerful biocomputing resource on the NUS BioGRID, will now be available to researchers and students throughout the university for life sciences and bioinformatics applications. Since the NUS BioGRID is part of the larger APBioGRID initiative of Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet), collaborating bioinformatics researchers in the Asia Pacific region will also be able to access this resource. In addition, three NUS bioinformatics staff members completed training at Cray's U.S. facilities on programming methods to exploit the special hardware capabilities of the Cray SV1 system for advanced life sciences research. The special capabilities were originally designed into Cray(R) supercomputers for intelligence community use. The joint NUS and Cray team are now tackling an important comparative genomics problem related to an international vertebrate genome project, with encouraging early results. Cray has joined other industry leaders in the use of Globus Toolkit, which recently was ported to the Cray SV1 supercomputer by the NUS team. This will ensure that Cray's high performance computing capabilities will be accessible to users through grids. "We are pleased to collaborate with the National University of Singapore as they work to advance the frontiers of life sciences research," said Cray Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "We look forward to supporting their exciting goals as part of Cray's long-term commitment to bioinformatics. The special capabilities of the Cray SV1 system promise to provide new insights at a growing number of leading bioinformatics research sites around the world." NUS staff said that until now, they have been running bioinformatics applications for teaching and research without the benefit of supercomputing power. "We believe that the most cost-effective way is to get the right machine to run the right software to do the thing the end user wants to achieve. With genomic databases doubling every 14 months, our bioinformaticists and life scientists can now carry out high throughput genomic analyses with supercomputing power," said Associate Professor Tan Tin Wee, Dept. of Biochemistry, NUS, who is leading this project in NUS and driving the APBioGrid initiative. NUS researchers are currently working hand in hand with Cray staff to build an appropriate suite of bioinformatics software, and will partner with collaborators internationally who are joining in the APBioGRID initiative. Dick Russell, Cray's Asia Pacific vice president, said, "Cray Japan plans to link the Cray SV1 system installed at its Tokyo data center to APBioGrid using Globus, and will pursue grid-based collaborations between researchers in Japan and Singapore." For more information visit www.cray.com or www.nus.edu.sg