INDUSTRY

Cray Inc. announced that Hinditron, its representative in India, has secured the first order in that country for the new Cray XD1 supercomputer product. A Cray XD1 system with 96 compute processors and more than 422 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) of peak performance will be installed in late 2004 at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata (Calcutta). Financial terms were not disclosed. "Saha Institute is pleased to do business with Cray Inc., starting a new chapter of excellence using supercomputers," said Professor Bikash Sinha, Director of the Saha Institute. "It is our endeavor to provide state-of-the-art computing facilities for the excellent research workers in our institute. The tantalizing predictions of lattice gauge theory hopefully will become transparent with the Cray XD1." "The Saha Institute produces world-class research in physical and biophysical sciences and will fully exploit the advanced capabilities of the Cray XD1 supercomputer to generate valuable new insights. We are proud to add this new customer and to be represented in the important Indian market by an organization as capable as Hinditron," said Cray Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Jim Rottsolk. "Hinditron is extremely pleased to continue its relationship with Saha Institute, Kolkata and support its research in advanced theoretical physics with the Cray XD1," said Hinditron Managing Director Saurabh Sonawala. Background With prices starting under $100,000 (U.S. list), the Cray XD1 supercomputer combines AMD's Opteron processors and HyperTransport technology with an advanced Cray interconnect to provide industry leading performance and value. Designed for superior sustained application performance, the Cray XD1 system uses the direct connected processor architecture to directly link processors to each other and memory, eliminating interconnect bottlenecks and providing 30 times greater bandwidth and 30 times lower latency than typical cluster systems available today. HPC users can also take advantage of the Cray XD1 system's sophisticated management, self-monitoring and self-healing features to simplify system administration and ensure high availability. Other Cray XD1 innovations include application acceleration capability based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) linked directly to processors over the Cray XD1 interconnect. Founded by Prof. Meghnad Saha and officially inaugurated in January 1950 as a part of University of Calcutta, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics is now an autonomous body and is one of the premier institutes in India for basic research in physical and biophysical sciences. More than 200 faculty members, post- doctoral fellows and graduate students are currently engaged in research on the forefronts of six major areas: theoretical physics, condensed matter physics, high energy physics and microelectronics, nuclear science, material physics and biophysical science. Traditionally, the institute has had a very strong and vibrant teaching and Ph.D. program. Cray Inc. pioneered high-performance computing with the introduction of the Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976. The only company dedicated to meeting the specific needs of high performance computing, Cray designs and manufactures supercomputers used by government, industry and academia worldwide for applications ranging from scientific research to product design, testing to manufacturing. Cray's diverse product portfolio offers superior performance and reliability to the entire HPC market, addressing the scalability needs of the high-end capability segment and the broad demands for smaller systems.