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 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 performance, stride independent memory bandwidth, instruction level parallelism 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 in its initial design, and to exceed a petaflop (a thousand trillion calculations per second) in its product lifetime.

"We are very gratified for the strong support of Congressmen David Obey, Martin Olav Sabo 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 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.

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.

    CONTACT: Cray Inc.
             James E. Rottsolk, 206-701-2058
             jim@cray.com
             or
             Snyder Investor Relations
             John Snyder, 206-262-0291
             john@snyderir.com

    SOURCE: Cray Inc.