Vendor Spotlight:

CRAY INC. REPORTS ADVANCE ORDER FOR RED STORM-BASED PRODUCT

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. reported that a Canadian organization has placed an advance order for the company's upcoming product based on the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer. The Red Storm-based system is scheduled to be installed at the customer's facility in late 2004. Further terms were not disclosed.

Earlier this month, Cray announced that the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) had placed an advance order for a Red Storm-based system, to be installed in the third quarter.

"We're seeing very strong interest in this upcoming product, which is designed to be more efficient and cost-effective for challenging problems and workloads than the clustered SMP systems available in the HPC marketplace today," according to Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "For really serious problems like this, purpose-built HPC systems are vastly superior to loosely linked clusters of servers or PCs."

Red Storm is a 40-TeraOps (40 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer Cray is scheduled to deliver this year to Sandia National Laboratories under a $93 million Department of Energy contract. The Red Storm-based product targets the need for highly scalable microprocessor-based supercomputers with high bandwidth. Sandia National Laboratories partnered with Cray in designing the Red Storm architecture.

About Cray Inc.

Cray's mission is to be the premier provider of supercomputing solutions for its customers' most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Go to http://www.cray.com for more information about the company.