Cray Inc. Announces $9.7 Million 'Red Storm' Order from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

SEATTLE -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced that the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has received a $9.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to acquire a Cray Red Storm-based supercomputer.

A Red Storm-based system with 2,000 AMD Opteron(TM) processors and 10 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of peak performance is scheduled to be installed at PSC by the end of 2004, where it will be made broadly available to the U.S. academic research community. The capability of the system can be greatly expanded in the future.

"The Red Storm system in Pittsburgh will enable researchers to explore the limits of high-performance computing and to demonstrate the potential of this architecture for a wide range of scientific applications," said Peter Freeman, head of NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. "The system will complement other systems already provided by NSF to the national community and will strengthen the growing high-end computing partnership between NSF and the Department of Energy."

Because of its superior interprocessor communication, Red Storm will provide a powerful platform for research applications designed for efficient "scaling" -- using hundreds or thousands of processors simultaneously on the same problem. In this respect, PSC expects it to succeed its current LeMieux computer -- which last year provided more than 60 percent of the computing time used through NSF -- as the prime NSF resource for the most complex, demanding projects in computational science and engineering.

"We're extremely gratified to be able to introduce Red Storm for the NSF," said PSC scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement. "PSC has unmatched experience in deploying new systems for the national research community. Going back to the CRAY Y-MP in 1990, we have installed over a half-dozen first and early systems of diverse architectures."

"Cray is very pleased to partner with PSC and the NSF to deliver a system, built from the ground up for high-end computing, to the broader academic research community," said Peter Ungaro, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Cray Inc. "Bringing the Red Storm system to PSC will provide researchers with incredibly high bandwidth and usability while leveraging the best in microprocessor technology and price/performance. We are excited to imagine how this Cray technology will be used to push the bounds of science."

Like LeMieux, PSC's Red Storm will be integrated into the TeraGrid, a multi-year NSF effort to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed infrastructure for open scientific research.

Because Red Storm's network is an integral design feature of the system, Red Storm will occupy much less floor space than LeMieux, about as much as a spacious living room (12 x 28 feet) compared to the basketball-court size space used by LeMieux.

PSC's Red Storm will employ many of the same technologies as the larger, 41.5 teraflop Red Storm system being installed at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Although that system has complex features required for classified research, that are unnecessary in PSC's open research environment, PSC and Sandia will pool their knowledge and experience with Red Storm to maximize its productivity as a scientific resource. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is acquiring a 20 teraflop Red Storm system in 2005, along with a 20 teraflop Cray X1E(TM) vector MPP supercomputer, as the first phase of a plan to provide a 250 teraflop capability at Oak Ridge.

Cray designed the Red Storm architecture with Sandia National Laboratories as part of a $93 million contract awarded to Cray in 2002.

About Cray Inc.

The world's leading supercomputer company, 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.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements. There are certain factors that could cause Cray's execution plans to differ materially from those anticipated by the statements above. These include the technical challenges of developing high performance computing systems, government support of supercomputer systems research and development and purchases, reliance on third-party suppliers, the passing of acceptance tests, the successful porting of application programs to Cray systems, Cray's ability to keep up with rapid technological change and general economic and market conditions. For a discussion of these and other risks, see "Factors That Could Affect Future Results" in Cray's most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC.

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