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Cray Reports Order for 144-Processor Cray XD1 System from Alabama Supercomputer Authority

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced that it has received an order for a 12-chassis Cray XD1 supercomputer system for the Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA). Financial terms were not disclosed.

After successful testing and evaluation of a three-chassis pre-production Cray XD1 system at ASA's Alabama Supercomputer Center, ASA approved implementation of the full system. Cray recently installed a 72-processor Cray XD1 system at the Alabama Supercomputer Center in Huntsville, AL. Later this year, the system will be expanded to a full cabinet of 144 AMD Opteron processors with 634 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) of peak processing power. Each of these installations will represent the largest configurations of the Cray XD1 installed to date.

Randy Fulmer, CEO of ASA, said that the Cray XD1 system "will provide a leading-edge resource to Alabama's academic community for the advancement of science and engineering research to meet national and state priorities. All education institutions in Alabama will have access to this new Cray XD1 system for collaborative research efforts."

The acquisition of the Cray XD1 system is part of a collaborative agreement between the University of Alabama and ASA. Dr. David Dixon, Ramsay Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alabama, said the new system initially will target research in computational chemistry and biology. "The high bandwidth and low latency of the Cray XD1 system's RapidArray(TM) interconnect promise to provide substantial improvements in computational efficiency over more traditional clustered and distributed HPC systems."

"We are very excited to partner with ASA to help meet the needs of researchers across the state. The Cray XD1 is providing scientists and engineers with a platform designed from the ground up to meet their HPC challenges, which is an attractive alternative to buying a cluster assembled from general-purpose business servers," said Peter Ungaro, Cray's senior vice president of sales, marketing and services. "With the Cray XD1 supercomputer starting under $100,000, customers in many disciplines around the world are now turning to Cray for purpose-built solutions for scientific and engineering research."

About the Cray XD1 Supercomputer

With U.S. list prices starting under $100,000, the Cray XD1 supercomputer combines AMD's Opteron processors and HyperTransport technology with an advanced Cray interconnect to provide industry leading performance and value. Designed for superior sustained application performance, the Cray XD1 system uses the direct connected processor architecture to directly link processors to each other and memory, eliminating interconnect bottlenecks and providing 30 times greater bandwidth and 30 times lower latency than typical cluster systems available today.

HPC users can also take advantage of the Cray XD1 system's sophisticated management, self-monitoring and self-healing features to simplify system administration and ensure high availability. Other Cray XD1 innovations include applications acceleration capability based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) linked directly to processors over the Cray XD1 interconnect.

About The Alabama Supercomputer Authority

The Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA) is a state-funded corporation founded in 1989 to operate the Alabama Supercomputer Center (ASC) and the Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN). The Alabama Supercomputer Authority provides Internet, Internet2, technology services, and high performance computing resources to Alabama's K12 schools, colleges, and universities.

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.

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.