SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 15, 2004--Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NasdaqNM:CRAY) today announced that the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has placed an advance order for a Cray XD1(TM) system. Financial terms were not disclosed.

An early version of the Cray XD1 system is scheduled to be shipped later this month and installed at PNNL's Richland, Washington facility. PNNL will use the system to advance research in areas including power grid simulation, life science research and information analysis. This will be the first Cray XD1 system made available to the scientific community. The early system will be upgraded to a production model in the fall of 2004, Cray officials said.

Development of the renamed Cray XD1 system has continued within Cray since the company acquired OctigaBay Systems and its workforce in April 2004. The Cray XD1 system strongly exploits high volume technologies such as AMD Opteron(TM) processors and HyperTransport(TM) technology, as well as the Linux operating system, while innovating with a high performance system interconnect known as RapidArray(TM), an automated management infrastructure, and the opportunity to accelerate application performance through the use of field programmable gate arrays.

George Michaels, PNNL associate laboratory director, said the lab's acquisition of the Cray XD1 system will enable PNNL "to continue our leadership in applying high-performance scientific computing to some of the nation's most important problems. The Cray XD1 will be an indispensable tool for PNNL engineers and scientists to bring a new approach to simulate and analyze faster, solve more complex data intensive problems, and bring science to solutions sooner."

Scott Studham, associate director of the PNNL's advanced computing effort, explained that the Cray XD1 is the first HPC product to locate field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) near memory, a feature that makes it particularly valuable for high-performance scientific computing.

"The new system's hardware can be reconfigured to quickly free up massive amounts of memory for compute-intensive and data-intensive science," Studham said.

According to Peter Ungaro, Cray's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, "We are truly excited that a leading research institute such as PNNL has selected Cray as a high performance computing partner and will take advantage of our new Cray XD1 server as the computing platform for some of their most important research initiatives. For a broad spectrum of scientific and engineering problem, the Cray XD1 system is going to enable revolutionary breakthroughs that just aren't possible on similarly priced HPC cluster products."

The Cray XD1 system is designed around the Direct Connected Processor architecture, an innovative approach that directly links together processors to provide 30 times higher bandwidth and 30 times lower latency than typical cluster systems available today. Other Cray XD1 innovations include an applications accelerator, reconfigurable logic (FPGAs), self-monitoring and self-healing features for high availability, and single system command and control for simplified system administration.

Early shipments of the Cray XD1 product are scheduled for the second half of 2004, with general availability in early 2005. Pricing, to be announced later this year, is expected to range from under $100,000 to about $2 million.

About Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is a DOE Office of Science laboratory that solves complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences by advancing the understanding of physics, chemistry, biology and computation. PNNL employs 3,800 staff, has a $600 million annual budget, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965. Business and public inquiries on this and other PNNL research and technologies should be directed to 1-888-375-PNNL or inquiry@pnl.gov.

About Cray Inc.

Cray's mission is to be the premier provider of high performance computing 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 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. (Media)
Lori Kaiser, 206-701-2233
lkaiser@cray.com
or
Cray Inc. (Media)
Steve Conway, 651-592-7441
sttico@aol.com
or
Cray Inc. (Investors)
Victor Chynoweth, 206-701-2280
victorc@cray.com

SOURCE: Cray Inc.