SEATTLE,  Dec. 18 -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the selection of a Cray XT4 system by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). With more than 27 teraflops of computational capability, the Cray XT4 system will be housed at the NAOJ's Center for Computational Astrophysics (CfCA) to aid scientists and researchers in the study of the origin of planetary systems and galaxies and the formation of stars and star clusters.

"The NAOJ has the most advanced observing facilities in the world and the Cray XT4 system will enable advancements in the critical computer simulations that allow its researchers to reproduce and observe astronomical phenomena in a virtual environment," said Mamoru Nakano, president of Cray Japan. "We are honored to aid the NAOJ and CfCA in their mission of advancing astronomy, astrophysics and related fields of science. The Cray XT4 system will enable them to perform some of the largest numerical experiments ever attempted, bringing them another step closer to solving such long-standing questions as the origin of various galaxies, the evolution of the solar system and the accurate dimensions of massive black holes."

"The huge time and spatial scales associated with astronomical phenomena make laboratory experiments impossible. Computer simulations allow us to create virtual universes, which help us to understand the early stages and evolution of the universe and the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars, black holes and planets," said Jun Makino, director of CfCA. "We are dedicated to providing astronomers with the most advanced resources and the Cray XT4 supercomputer will allow us to achieve this goal."

The Cray XT4 system is a massively parallel processor (MPP) system that provides unrivaled sustained performance by balancing performance among powerful processors, memory, interconnect and IO. Both hardware and software are designed to scale to more than 120,000 processor cores and over one petaflops of peak performance.

The NAOJ joins the ranks of other prominent research organizations that will receive Cray XT4 systems with the recently announced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. These include the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, CSC Finland, Engineer Research and Development Center for the US Army Corps of Engineers and the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for the High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) national academic service.

About the Cray XT4 Supercomputer

Building on the success of the Cray XT3 system, the Cray XT4 is an MPP supercomputer purpose-built to deliver exceptional sustained application performance for challenging scientific and engineering problems. 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 to more than 120,000 processor cores with exceptional sustained performance. The system's scalable processing element uses x86 64-bit AMD Opteron processors that employ HyperTransport technology to increase bandwidth and reduce latency. Go to www.cray.com/products/xt4/index.html for more information.

About Cray Inc.

As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

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Source: Cray Inc.