Cray Inc. announced that it has signed an agreement with the U.S. Government to continue the development of next-generation supercomputer technologies. The agreement calls for Cray and the Government to each invest approximately $17.0 million over the next two years. "This new contract extends the important partnership between Cray and the Government. It reflects our mutual, ongoing commitment to developing the next-generation system we have code-named Black Widow, and to U.S. supercomputing leadership," said Jim Rottsolk, Cray chairman and chief executive officer. "The objective of this program is to produce supercomputer technologies that support superior memory bandwidth performance, stride independent memory bandwidth, instruction level parallelism and power efficiency. "The development of these systems advances our product roadmap," Rottsolk added. "With continued funding, we expect Black Widow to reach a peak performance of several hundred teraflops in its initial design, and to exceed a petaflops (a thousand trillion calculations per second) in its product lifetime. "We are very gratified for the strong support of Congressmen David Obey, Martin Olav Sabo and Norm Dicks in furthering this key public-private partnership," he said.