GOVERNMENT

Cray has announced that it has shipped the first multi-cabinet Cray XE6 supercomputer. This is the beginning of the anticipated shipment of several significant systems to a number of customers over the next few months.

"We are very proud of achieving this important milestone, which is the result of innovation, hard work and a strong commitment from Cray employees company-wide," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "There is still a lot of work to be done, but shipping the first large Cray XE6 system is a special accomplishment. On behalf of the company, I would like to thank our partners and suppliers, all of our customers who have been working with us through the development process and the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for their support. Also, I would like to extend a special thanks to our beta-testing partner, the Swiss National Supercomputer Center (CSCS), for their help in getting the Cray XE6 supercomputer ready to meet this major milestone."

Cray shipped a beta-level Cray XE6 system to CSCS in June and, in addition to the multi-cabinet system mentioned above, has also shipped a number of small, test and development systems to additional customers.

Launched in May 2010, the new Cray XE6 supercomputer combines the company's new Gemini system interconnect with powerful AMD Opteron processors and is designed to bring production petascale computing to a new and expanded base of high performance computing users. Fully upgradeable from a Cray XT5 or Cray XT6 system, the Cray XE6 supercomputer features additional enhancements such as an improved network resiliency, a mature scalable software ecosystem and the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment. This collection of industry-leading features provides Cray XE6 users with a supercomputing system that combines true scalable performance with production reliability.

Although Cray has begun shipping Cray XE6 systems, to obtain revenue and cash from these sales, or any future Cray XE6 deliveries, the company must obtain customer acceptances of the systems typically based on a multi-week process of performance, functionality and reliability testing.