GOVERNMENT

DENVER , CO -- Supercomputer provider Cray Inc (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today announced an agreement with OSC (Ohio Supercomputer Center), Columbus, Ohio, to collaborate on assessing technologies for what is expected to be the world's most powerful supercomputer product. As part of the 14-month agreement, OSC will help Cray evaluate several I/O node technologies and data archiving tools under consideration for the Cray SV2™ product due out in the second half of 2002. Cray and OSC signed the memorandum of understanding at SC2001, the annual conference of the high-performance computing community in progress here. "This agreement expands our long-term relationship with OSC as both a customer and technology partner," said Cray Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Michael P. Haydock. "Working together, we'll learn which technologies best achieve certain Cray SV2 requirements. And OSC will benefit from early exposure to a highly advanced supercomputing architecture - furthering its mission to promote new computing systems and technology." Earlier this year, Cray Inc. announced an OEM agreement with Sun Microsystems, Inc. that gave Cray the ability to rebrand, directly market and sell Sun Fire™ servers as data management (input/output) nodes within Cray's next-generation Cray SV2 and Cray MTA-2™ products. OSC's large installed base of Sun systems, including Sun Fire 6800 servers, makes it an ideal environment for testing the high-end I/O capabilities of various Sun systems to determine the optimal system and system configuration for Cray SV2 I/O nodes. "OSC looks upon the joint research project to work with Cray to leverage both organizations expertise in data management and I/O functionality," said OSC High Performance Computing Director Al Stutz. "OSC has a rich tradition in working with leaders in technology development. This project will clearly benefit Ohio researchers and the national science computational community." Cray and OSC also will evaluate data archival tools and related technologies as part of the agreement. The goal of this project is to ease migration of customer codes to the Cray SV2 system by gaining further insight into migration issues and developing a well-documented transition process for potential Cray SV2 customers. The Cray SV2 supercomputer will offer extreme performance from tens of gigaflops (billions of calculations per second) to multiple tens of teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). Key markets for Cray SV2 systems include government classified, academic/government research, weather forecasting, petroleum and high-end industrial. For more information visit www.osc.edu or www.cray.com