December 16, 2005
Cray plans to reduce its full-time staff by approximately 65 people, or about 8 percent of their workforce, according to a document filed Wednesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The staff reductions will take place during 2006, most by March 31, 2006. According to Cray, almost all of the staff reductions affect their international sales, service and engineering personnel, many based out of our Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada facility, with the remainder in Europe.
Apparently, at least some the layoffs are related to the decision to combine the Cray XD1 and Cray XT3 products into one unified product with a planned delivery date in 2007. According to Cray, this action makes execution of that strategy more efficient, with the reduction of overlapping skills and reduced reliance on multi-location product development. Cray is focused on the higher end of the high performance computing market and believes that less geographic breadth of sales and service is needed to carry out the strategy. The reductions in Europe are designed to bring service and sales expenses in line with anticipated reduced revenue there.
Estimated annual expense savings, once the actions are completed, are expected to be about $7 million per year. This is anticipated to be partially offset by certain hiring in other locations to augment required skill sets as they implement their product development plans. Overall, net estimated annual savings should be about $4 million, once the plan is completed.
"We do not anticipate that these actions will have a material impact on our current plans for our products, our support of customers or our planned future development programs," the company stated in the SEC document. "However, there is risk that the impact could negatively affect product development, customer service and sales. Additionally, we may not achieve the estimated savings or may under-estimate the restructuring costs."
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The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
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The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.