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Sandia's Red Storm Is First Computer to Exceed 1 Terabyte per Second on Important HPCC Benchmark Test

Cray Supercomputer Excels in Interconnect Bandwidth

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that the "Red Storm" supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark on a widely used test that measures communications among processors in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and provides a key indication of the total communication capacity of the network.

Red Storm posted 1.8 TB/sec (1.8 trillion bytes per second) on the PTRANS interconnect bandwidth test that is part of the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) test suite. By comparison, this figure represents 40 times more communications power per teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) than the PTRANS result posted by an IBM Blue Gene system that has more than 10 times as many processors.

Red Storm was developed jointly by Sandia and Cray. The same architecture is used in the Cray XT3(TM) massively parallel supercomputer, a system that is commercially available and has been installed in HPC centers around the world. During the low-workload December 2005 holiday period, Sandia was able to run tests on the entire 10,350-processor Red Storm system, which normally cannot be tested as one system because it is partitioned into classified and non-classified segments.

"We are delighted that Red Storm has broken the 1 TB/sec barrier on the HPCC PTRANS test," said Jeff Brooks, Cray's product manager for massively parallel processing. "While impressive teraflops results have become commonplace on Linpack-style tests, even on loosely connected computer clusters, Red Storm is the first system to achieve more than a terabyte per second on a communications-intensive test. This test is very important to HPC users because it is a good measure of overall system capability. It also indicates how well Cray supercomputers balance processing power and communications power. The results are right in line with the performance Cray users are seeing as they scale their demanding scientific applications to thousands of processors."

Complete HPCC results for all listed systems are available on the web at http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/hpcc_results.cgi.

About the HPCC Benchmarks

Developed by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek of the University of Tennessee, with collaborators from the U.S. and Europe, the HPCC benchmark suite debuted in 2003 under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and DARPA. The tests are designed to assess those aspects of HPC that have the greatest effect on performance under real-world conditions. The HPCC suite includes Linpack, a single test of processor performance that is the basis for the semi-annual TOP500 supercomputer ranking. The suite substantially augments the Linpack measurement with seven other tests that take into account system memory and interconnect performance. More tests are expected to be added in the future. Go to http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html for more information.

About Red Storm

Sandia and Cray co-designed the Red Storm computer architecture as part of a contract under the DOE's Advanced Simulation & Computing program. Red Storm will be expanded to 50-teraflop performance from its current 40-teraflop capacity later this year. The Red Storm design became the basis for the Cray XT3 massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer that has been installed at a number of prestigious supercomputing centers worldwide. Go to www.sandia.gov for more information.

About the Cray XT3 Supercomputer

The Cray XT3 supercomputer is the third-generation MPP system from Cray. Purpose-built to deliver exceptional sustained application performance for challenging scientific and engineering problems, the Cray XT3 system has set new performance records for systems equipped with standard-based processors. The supercomputer's high-speed 3D torus interconnect, advanced MPP operating system and high-speed global input/output make it possible for users to scale applications from 200 to more than 30,000 processors without performance loss. The system's scalable processing element uses x86 64-bit AMD Opteron(TM) single or dual-core processors that employ HyperTransport(TM) technology to increase bandwidth and reduce latency. The Cray XT3 supercomputer was named 2005 Product of the Year by Scientific Computing & Instrumentation. Go to www.cray.com/products/CrayXT3 for more information.

About Cray Inc.

As the global leader in HPC, Cray provides innovative supercomputing systems that enable scientists and engineers in government, industry and academia to meet both existing and future computational challenges. Building on years of experience in designing, developing, marketing and servicing the world's most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of HPC systems that deliver unrivaled sustained performance on a wide range of applications. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray XT3 is a trademark, of Cray Inc. Opteron is a trademark of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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