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Dallas, Texas — Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today unveiled the Cray SV1ex(tm) supercomputer product line at SC2000, the annual high-performance computing conference held here. The new line strongly enhances the performance and price/performance of the current Cray SV1 series that was named “Supercomputer Product of the Year” by Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine in 1999, and recently re-honored for the year 2000.

The air-cooled Cray SV1ex vector systems are slated for availability in the first half of 2001, at U.S. list pricing from $700,000. Publicly announced advance orders include the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, which also has an option to acquire a next-generation Cray SV2(tm) system; and the Department of Defense Major Shared Resource Center operated by the Naval Oceanographic Office, which plans to upgrade to a Supercluster(tm) of four coupled Cray SV1ex supercomputer systems.

Cray Inc. has installed more than 100 of the current Cray SV1 systems since general availability began in September 1999, with five systems ordered by Ford Motor Company alone. Half of the volume has come from outside the U.S. Cray SV1 innovations including multi-streaming processors and vector caches have enabled breakthrough scientific and engineering research.

“Anti-cancer drug discovery is a field where you need to proceed faster than ‘Moore’s Law,’ said Dr. Fred Hausheer, founder and CEO of San Antonio-based BioNumerik Pharmaceuticals. “This is what Cray has been able to deliver. The Cray SV1 memory bandwidth and shared memory architecture let us do what we need to do, better than any other system.”

“The Cray SV1ex line provides an attractive, binary-compatible upgrade path for the Cray SV1 installed base, as well as for prior-generation Cray J90 and Cray C90 systems,” according to Rene Copeland, vice president of marketing and sales. “Because the enhanced Cray SV1ex will rival or outperform the Cray T90 on a range of important problems at substantially lower price points, we also expect demand from Cray T90 and other high-end vector customers,” Copeland said.

The Cray SV1ex multi-streaming vector processors are 50 percent faster at 7.2 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) each, sustained memory bandwidth effectively doubles to 40 gigabytes per second, cache latency improves by 50 percent, and maximum memory size jumps four-fold to 128 gigabytes-all without affecting industry-leading Cray SV1 reliability (MTTI) averaging more than one year between interrupts.

“The Cray SV1ex is a balanced system,” said Cray Inc. President and CEO Jim Rottsolk. “It’s a workhorse and a racehorse that will deliver more value than any competing system for targeted problems and workloads in industry, government and university-based research. In an era of undifferentiated, ‘vanilla’ architectures that are inefficient at real-world computing, Cray Inc. provides innovative, efficient systems that help customers advance the boundaries of science and engineering.”

“The extreme reliability and attractive price/performance of the Cray SV1ex system will allow us to support some of the biggest, most complex applications of our large user base,” said Dr. Frank Williams, vice chancellor of administrative services at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and director of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC).

Cray SV1ex enhancements will roll out in two phases, Copeland said. Enhancements scheduled for first-quarter 2001 include improved clock speed (450 MHz, 2.2 nanoseconds), improved cache, and field upgradeability for Cray SV1 and Cray J90 systems. Enhancements slated for second-quarter 2001 include a new memory subsystem (approximately 40 gigabytes/second), optional 32 GB or 96 GB SSD, and CPU and memory field upgradeability for Cray SV1 3000-series systems.

Cray SV1ex systems will be available with:

* 8 to 32 processors, 32 gigabytes (GB) of main memory, and 32 to 96 GB of SSD memory. Groups of four 1.8-gigaflop processors can be run as a 7.2-gigaflop multi-streaming processor.

* A powerful suite of clustering tools that allow multiple Cray SV1ex nodes to be combined to form terascale superclusters(tm) of up to 1,024 processors (1.8 teraflops).

* The company’s fifth-generation CMOS architecture (0.12 micron copper), SDRAM DIMM and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technologies.

* The Cray library of supercomputer applications and tenth-generation UNICOS (UNIX) operating system.

* The ability to run Cray SV1, Cray J90, Cray C90 codes, including autotasked codes, without modification or recompiling.

* Support for standard PVM, MPI, SHMEM, Autotasking, OpenMP programming models.

The Cray SV1ex product line will be succeeded by the Cray SV2 supercomputer series due out in the second half of 2002.

For more information on the Cray SV1ex series, visit www.cray.com or contact your local Cray sales representative.

About Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. designs, builds and sells high-performance vector processor and general-purpose parallel computer systems. The company has leading edge technology, multiple product platforms, nearly 900 employees, a $2 billion installed base of over 600 computers worldwide, major manufacturing and service capabilities and extensive global customer relationships. Cray believes its Multithreaded Architecture and Cray T3E(tm) and Cray SV(tm) series systems together represent the future of supercomputing. Go to http://www.cray.com for more information on the company.

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