Cray Inc. Reports First Customer Acceptance of Full Production Version of Cray X1 System; NCSI Accepts System for Army High Performance Computing Research Center.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 14, 2003

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today reported the first customer acceptance of a full-production version of the new Cray X1(TM) supercomputer system.

The system was accepted by Network Computing Services, Inc. (NCSI), systems integrator and computing facilities manager for the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC).

On January 24, 2003, Cray announced a $15 million order from NCSI for fully populated, production Cray X1 supercomputer equipment, to be installed in stages during 2003. The first, 32-processor stage has fully passed all customer acceptance tests, Cray officials said.

"Passing the acceptance tests of a demanding customer like NSCI is a very important milestone for our new Cray X1 product," said Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "It demonstrates that the Cray X1 operates reliably at full clock speed and has met the aggressive performance expectations set out in NCSI's testing process. The Cray X1 was designed to be the world's most powerful supercomputer product. The NSCI acceptance increases confidence that it will make good on that claim."

"The first full-production Cray X1 system has demonstrated its ability to perform on Army applications in computational fluid dynamics, computational mechanics and battlefield weather forecasting that are of great importance to the defense of the United States," said Paul Muzio, NCSI VP-Government Programs and AHPCRC Support Infrastructure Director. "The Cray X1 is an excellent high-capability system that provides impressive sustained performance for large, complex applications."

"This week, the AHPCRC demonstrated the use of the NCAR/Penn State Mesoscale Weather Forecast Model, MM5, on the Cray X1 system to produce a forecast for the entire United States with a resolution of 5 kilometers," Muzio said. "MM5 is used worldwide and also within the Department of Defense (DoD) for operational weather forecasts. Current operational weather models that cover all of the United States are typically run at a resolution of about 10 kilometers. The 5-kilometer model requires approximately eight times as much computation as the 10-kilometer model and four times as much memory (20 billion bytes).

"In executing this model, the Cray X1 system sustained 36.7 billion floating point operations per second in the forecast steps on just 16 multi-streaming processors and simulated one hour of atmospheric physics and dynamics in 8.4 minutes on average, or 24 simulation hours in under 3.5 wall clock hours," he added.

According to Muzio, "The AHPCRC has seen similar performance on other important DoD applications. For example, on a widely used AHPCRC unstructured mesh fluid dynamics application, we have seen linear scaling across all the application processors with a sustained performance of 4 gigaflops per processor, or 117 gigaflops on 28 multi-streaming processors."

"We are excited about the overall performance of the Cray X1 -- it is clearly performing as we had expected," Muzio said. "Our applications are already sustaining 25 percent of peak performance on average, and we expect this to improve. We are delighted that the Army and the AHPCRC were the first in the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) to install and accept a full-production Cray X1 supercomputer. Two other HPCMP sites, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, AK, and the Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, MS will also install Cray X1 systems this year. These three sites will have an installed base of four Cray X1 systems and will represent the largest quantity of Cray X1s within any single unclassified program."

About the AHPCRC

The AHPCRC is a Government-University-Industry partnership committed to helping the U. S. Army and the nation maintain its defense technology lead and providing future generations of researchers with advanced training and research opportunities in science, engineering and the computational sciences. Funding for the AHPCRC is provided by the U.S. Army and the Army Research Laboratory (www.arl.army.mil) with funding for major equipment acquisition provided through the DoD HPCMP (www.hpcmo.hpc.mil). NCSI is the prime contractor for AHPCRC Support Infrastructure, Contract DAAD19-03-D-0001. The University of Minnesota is the prime contractor for the AHPCRC Collaborative Agreement for Research whose partners include Clark Atlanta, Florida A&M, Howard, and Jackson State Universities, the University of North Dakota, and NCSI, Contract DAAD19-01-2-0014 (www.ahpcrc.org).

About NCSI

NCSI, as systems integrator and computing facilities manager for the AHPCRC, will operate the AHPCRC's Cray X1 systems. NCSI has a 20-year history of providing commercial high performance computing services to Fortune 500 companies and the government. NCSI is a subsidiary of netASPx, Inc. (www.netaspx.com) netASPx provides a broad spectrum of information services, including integrated business to business E-commerce applications, systems integration, applications management, network computing, and shared-computing services on some of the world's most powerful high-performance computer systems. netASPx is a leading, facilities-based ASP headquartered in Herndon, Virginia with its Operations Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

About Cray Inc.

Cray's mission is to be the premier provider of supercomputing solutions for customers' most challenging technical problems. Go to www.cray.com for more information about the company.

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. Among these factors are the technical challenges of producing the Cray X1 system on a sustainable basis, successful porting of application programs to the Cray X1 system, the ability of Cray supercomputer systems to pass individual customer acceptance tests, timely availability of commercially acceptable components from third-party suppliers, risks inherent in government procurements and general economic and market conditions. For a discussion of these and other risks, see "Risk Factors" in Cray's most recent Form 10- K filed with the SEC on March 28, 2003.

Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray X1 is a trademark, of Cray Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.