GOVERNMENT

AMD and Cray Inc. today announced that they have signed an agreement that extends their successful relationship through the end of the decade. Cray will continue to use AMD Opteron processors for the microprocessor-based supercomputer products Cray develops during this period. In addition, the two firms will actively collaborate on Cray's mid-2006 proposal for Phase 3 of the federal government's DARPA HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) program. "After an extensive review of marketplace alternatives, we selected the AMD64 platform as the microarchitecture for our next-generation supercomputer products," said Cray President and CEO Peter Ungaro. "In the near-term, the AMD Opteron processor roadmap provides our customers a smooth upgrade path to multi-core systems. Through 2010, AMD's multi-core processor roadmap and HyperTransport technology capabilities stand out for their ability to help meet our aggressive performance goals. Our success working with AMD in developing the Cray XT3 and the Cray XD1 systems gives us great confidence that AMD is the right partner to help Cray advance the boundaries of high performance computing." Cray and AMD will work closely together on Cray's mid-2006 submission for Phase 3 of the DARPA HPCS program. The program plans to provide economically viable, next-generation high productivity computing systems for the national security, scientific and industrial user communities that are able to run applications at sustained speeds of one petaflop (million billion calculations per second) or more by the end of the decade. "We anticipate our shared customers are excited about this strengthened relationship with Cray, the leading innovator in high performance computing, and we see this agreement as a strong vote of confidence in AMD and our role in high performance computing," said Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at AMD. "AMD's collaboration with Cray is not just about high performance computing, we believe the innovation sparked by this relationship, especially through our joint work on the DARPA HPCS proposal, could help define the future of the IT industry." "The goal of the HPCS program is to provide next-generation systems that are highly robust, easy to program, and perform efficiently at very large scales. Meeting this challenge will require an extremely strong engineering team, with the creativity to invent new HPC solutions and the experience to deliver them," said Steve Scott, Cray Chief Technology Officer. " Teaming with AMD further strengthens the Cray team and positions us to present an outstanding proposal to DARPA in spring 2006." Today, Cray offers the Cray XT3 and Cray XD1 supercomputers, based on the AMD Opteron processor, along with the Cray X1E supercomputer, based on Cray custom-built vector processors. This collaboration will further embed AMD technology in Cray's next-generation supercomputer products, which are designed to increase performance for HPC applications by drawing on both AMD Opteron and custom, specialized processors.