[Beowulf] Cray XD1 out

[Eugen Leitl]

http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=622736&highlight=

Cray Announces General Availability of the Cray XD1 Opteron/Linux-based
Supercomputer

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 4, 2004--Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc.
(Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced the general availability of the new Cray
XD1(TM) supercomputer, an Opteron/Linux-based system priced from under
$100,000 to about $2 million (U.S. list) that handily outperforms similarly
priced Linux clusters. The company also announced the United States
Department of Agriculture Forest Service is a Cray XD1 customer, which adds
to an impressive list of early users, including the Ohio Supercomputer
Center, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Germany's Helmut
Schmidt University and the SAHA Institute of Nuclear Physics (Calcutta,
India).

"Tracking the evolving chemical composition of a smoke plume produces a task
so computationally intense that we assumed we would not be able to afford any
computer capable of performing it," said Bryce Nordgren, Physical Scientist
with the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab. "Reviewing the test case results
from Cray restored our hope that we would be able to perform a scientifically
meaningful simulation on our budget. We were particularly impressed with the
Cray XD1's awesome scalability on this challenging interdisciplinary
problem."

The Cray XD1 supercomputer is ideal for the special needs of high-performance
computing (HPC) applications used by government and academia, as well as
computer-aided engineering (CAE) in the aerospace, automotive and marine
industries; weather forecasting and climate modeling; petroleum exploration;
financial modeling; and life sciences research.

"We evaluated many proposals from leading IT companies and decided on Cray
because of the Cray XD1 system's excellent price-to-performance ratio," said
Professor Hendrik Rothe, chair of Helmut Schmidt University's Laboratory for
Measurement and Information Technology.

According to Rich Partridge, Enterprise Systems analyst with D.H. Brown
Associates, "With the XD1, Cray leverages its strong heritage to bring highly
parallel, affordable supercomputing to a broad market of industrial,
government and academic users. The Cray XD1 is not merely an Opteron/Linux
parallel system; it is a 'Cray,' and that makes all the difference. This is a
true supercomputer, with balanced performance that commodity designs just
cannot achieve."

About the Cray XD1 Supercomputer

The Cray XD1 features the direct connect processor (DCP) architecture, which
removes PCI bottlenecks and memory contention to deliver superior sustained
performance. According to the HPC Challenge benchmarks, the Cray XD1 has the
lowest latency of any HPC system, with MPI latency of 1.8 microseconds and
random ring latency of 1.3 microseconds. Tests conducted by the Ohio
Supercomputer Center show that the Cray XD1 ships messages with four times
lower MPI latency than common cluster interconnects such as Infiniband,
Quadrics or Myrinet, and 30 times lower than Gigabit Ethernet employed in
lowest-cost clusters. The Cray XD1's interconnect delivers twice the
bandwidth of 4X Infiniband for messages up to 1 KB and 60 percent higher
throughput for very large messages.

The Linux/Opteron system runs x86 32/64 bit codes. Field programmable gate
arrays (FPGAs) are available to accelerate applications, and the Active
Manager subsystem provides single system command and control and high
availability features. A 3VU (5.25") chassis provides 12 compute processors,
58 peak gigaflops, 96 GB/second aggregate switching capacity, 1.8-microsecond
MPI interprocessor latency, 84 GB maximum memory and 1.5 TB maximum disk
storage. A 12-chassis rack provides 144 compute processors, 691 peak
gigaflops, 1TB/second aggregate switching capacity, 2 microsecond MPI
interprocessor latency, 922 GB/second aggregate memory bandwidth, 1 TB
maximum memory and 18 TB maximum disk storage.

About Cray Inc.

The world's leading supercomputer company, Cray Inc. pioneered
high-performance computing with the introduction of the Cray-1 in 1976. The
only company dedicated to meeting the specific needs of HPC users, 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
delivers superior performance, scalability and reliability to the entire HPC
market, from the high-end capability user to the department workgroup. For
more information, go to www.cray.com.

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 successful
porting of application programs to Cray systems 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.

Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray XD1 is a trademark, of Cray Inc. All
other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Cray Inc.
Victor Chynoweth, 206-701-2280 (Investors)
victorc at cray.com
or
Steve Conway, 651-592-7441 (Media)
sttico at aol.com

SOURCE: Cray Inc.
"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of
1995: Statements in this press release regarding Cray Inc.'s business which
are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks
and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which
could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the
forward-looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report
or Form 10-K for the most recently ended fiscal year.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
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