Cray Signs DARPA Contract for Research on Trans-Petaflops Systems

SEATTLE, WA -- Supercomputer provider Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today announced that it has signed an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems Program. The DARPA program is designed to provide the Department of Defense with significant technology and productivity advancements for the national security and industrial user community over currently existing systems. The $3.6 million grant calls for Cray and its collaborators to design a program of advanced research related to making "trans-petaflops" systems-computers able to perform more than a million billion calculations per second-much easier to program, more broadly applicable and more resistant to failure than today's high performance systems. "Our work under the DARPA initiative furthers our corporate dedication to developing high bandwidth balanced systems that can solve customers' most challenging problems," said James Rottsolk, Cray chairman and CEO. "We have already commenced development programs for products that will succeed our Cray SV2 and Cray SV2e (code named) systems. The DARPA initiative will provide the basis for our product development well beyond the end of the decade," added Rottsolk. "We have assembled an outstanding team with unmatched credentials to respond to DARPA's requirements," said Burton J. Smith, Cray's chief scientist. "Our partners include William Dally of Stanford, Peter Kogge of Notre Dame and Thomas Sterling of the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We and our collaborators have the expertise for developing high bandwidth, latency tolerant, balanced, easy to program, robust computer systems," Smith continued. "The DARPA program recognizes that these factors and high sustained performance on real programs are what users and the high performance community truly require." Visit www.cray.com for more information.