ACADEMIA

SEATTLE, WA -- Supercomputer provider Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced that it has signed an agreement with the U.S. Government to pursue the development of next-generation supercomputer technologies. The agreement calls for the Government and Cray to each invest $10 million over the next two years. "This agreement reflects the U.S. Government's commitment to supercomputing leadership and the recognition that Cray is the only U.S. company dedicated to develop high-bandwidth high-performance systems that meet these critical needs," said James Rottsolk, Cray's chairman and chief executive officer. "Our efforts will be directed to memory and processor enhancements to our SV2 (code-named) system due out later this year, and to developing a successor system to the SV2 that includes vector registers, distributed shared memory, superior memory bandwidth performance, stride independent memory bandwidth, instruction level parallelism and power efficiency," added Rottsolk. "This development will take peak performance of the SV2 design, which is around 50 teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion operations per second), to about 150 teraflops for the improved SV2 system," noted Rottsolk. "Assuming continued funding, the initial design of the SV2 successor should have a peak performance of several hundred teraflops, and during its product life should exceed a petaflop. For purposes of comparison, the world's current most powerful computer system, the recently announced Earth Simulator system in Japan, has a peak performance of about 40 teraflops." "We look forward to working with the Congress and Administration to continue this key public-private partnership," said Rottsolk. "We are pleased and gratified with the strong support and continuing confidence in Cray exhibited by Congressmen Obey and Sabo. This funding would not have happened without their leadership and tenacity."