Cray Inc. Signs $17.5 Million Co-Funded Development Agreement.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 16, 2003 Global supercomputer leader 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 Cray and the government to each invest $17.5 million over the next two years. "Last year we signed a development agreement calling for $10 million each of investment by the government and Cray for memory and processor enhancements to the Cray X1(TM) system, leading to what we refer to as the Cray X1e(TM) system, and for helping to develop a successor system to the Cray X1 and Cray X1e system, which we have code-named our Black Widow black widow, poisonous spider of the genus Latrodectus, found throughout North and South America and common in the SW United States. The name derives from the fact that the female, like those of many other spider species, may eat the male after mating. system," said Jim Rottsolk, Cray chairman and chief executive officer. "This new contract increases the commitment of each party by an additional $17.5 million, and reflects the Government's ongoing commitment to U.S. supercomputing leadership," added Rottsolk. "The objective of this program is to produce supercomputer technologies that support superior memory bandwidth Memory bandwidth is the rate at which data can be read from or stored into a semiconductor memory by a processor. Memory bandwidth is usually expressed in units of bytes/second, though this can vary for systems with natural data sizes that are not a multiple of the commonly used performance, stride independent memory bandwidth, instruction level parallelism Instruction-level parallelism (ILP) is a measure of how many of the operations in a computer program can be performed simultaneously. Consider the following program: 1. e = a + b 2. f = c + d 3. and power efficiency. "The development of these systems advances our previously described product roadmap," Rottsolk added. "The Cray X1e system will increase peak performance from about 50 teraflops today to about 150 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). With continued funding, we expect the successor Black Widow system to reach a peak performance of several hundred teraflop (unit) teraflop - 10^12 flops. Intel beat Hitachi to the record of 1.06 teraflops, on 04 Dec 1996, unofficially in Beverton, Oregon, using 7264 Pentium Pro chips. in its initial design, and to exceed a petaflop (a thousand trillion calculations per second) in its product lifetime. "We are very gratified grat·i·fy tr.v. grat·i·fied, grat·i·fy·ing, grat·i·fies 1. To please or satisfy: His achievement gratified his father. See Synonyms at please. 2. for the strong support of Congressmen David Obey, Martin Olav Sabo Martin Olav Sabo (born February 28, 1938) is an American politician and member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) and a former United States Representative for Minnesota's fifth district, which includes Minneapolis; the district is one of eight congressional districts in and Norm Dicks in furthering this key public-private partnership." About Cray Inc. Cray is the premier provider of supercomputing solutions for its customers' most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Go to www.cray.com for more information about the company. Safe Harbor Safe Harbor 1. A legal provision to reduce or eliminate liability as long as good faith is demonstrated. 2. A form of shark repellent implemented by a target company acquiring a business that is so poorly regulated that the target itself is less attractive. 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 purchases, and Cray's ability to keep up with rapid technological change. 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 Form 10-Q See 10-Q. . Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray X1 and X1e are trademarks of Cray Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
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