RETAIL

SEATTLE--Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) has signed a $16.4 million order for a 128-processor Cray X1(TM) supercomputer system with peak performance of 1.64 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), along with maintenance for this system and ARSC's existing Cray SV1ex(TM), Cray SX-6(TM) and Cray T3E(TM) supercomputers. The new Cray X1 supercomputer is scheduled to be installed in stages during the second and third quarters of 2003 at the ARSC facility on the University of Alaska Fairbanks main campus. The agreement includes an option to acquire the successor Cray X1e(TM) system. ARSC's academic and government researchers will use the new system to study atmospheric, ionospheric, environmental and geophysical phenomena unique to the Arctic and high latitudes, as well as advanced bioinformatics problems. The Cray X1 system will support applications such as climate forecasting models that include ocean-ice-atmosphere-land interaction, models of tsunamis that threaten Alaska's coastal regions, models of global surface air temperature trends and ionospheric plasma physics. As part of the agreement, Cray will have partial use of the system for its own purposes for two years. "The Cray X1 system's extremely powerful capability will be crucial for accelerating the work of existing users whose important applications absorb as much speed and memory as we can deliver, and at the same time will provide a software environment conducive to development of more computational science applications, which can be applied to scientific questions of today and the future," said ARSC Director Dr. Frank Williams. "We are pleased that an organization of ARSC's stature continues to choose Cray to meet the increasingly demanding requirements of its users," said Cray Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "This significant order is another milestone for our new high-bandwidth, low-latency Cray X1 product, which was formally announced on November 14, 2002."