SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - Jun 27, 2012) - Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: [ CRAY ]) today announced it will install a next-generation Cray supercomputer code-named "Cascade" and a next-generation Cray Sonexion storage system at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Cray's Cascade system will provide an innovative supercomputing resource to NERSC users working to advance open science research in climate modeling, biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines, along with scientific visualization of massive data sets. NERSC is also home to a Cray XE6 supercomputer, named "Hopper."

"From energy efficient batteries to climate change, NERSC's 4,500 users are tackling problems that are of vital importance to our nation's competiveness and sustainability, so it is critical that our next system NERSC-7, deliver readily accessible performance on real-world applications," says Kathy Yelick, Associate Laboratory Director of Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab.

According to Yelick, it is also important that NERSC provide supercomputing resources to users in an energy efficient manner, and she says the new Cray system will enable many pioneering features on this front, including the ability to run year-round using "free-cooling" at the NERSC site. "This approach utilizes water from cooling towers only, not mechanical chillers, to provide exceptional energy efficiency. The moderate Bay Area climate combined with Cray's new design will allow us to keep power for cooling to less than 10 percent of the power used for computing," said Jeff Broughton, head of NERSC's System's Department.

"The researchers and scientists at NERSC are tackling an amazing set of important challenges across a wide range of scientific disciplines, and we are incredibly honored to provide their vast user community with a productive environment that also delivers high sustained performance," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Our development team has been busy working on our future products and we are very excited to see that the new innovations in our next generation of supercomputers and storage solutions are meeting the needs of leading customers such as NERSC. They are a great partner and we are excited that our relationship with them will continue."

Cray's next-generation Cascade supercomputer, which is expected to be widely available in the first half of 2013, is the next step in Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The system will provide over two petaflops of peak performance for NERSC. The system will feature major advancements of the Cray Linux Environment, Cray's HPC-optimized programming environment, and the next-generation Aries interconnect chipset. Cascade will also feature support for Intel® Xeon® processors -- a first for Cray's high-end systems. The Cascade supercomputer is in part made possible by Cray's participation in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems program.

The Cray Sonexion storage system delivered to NERSC will scale to more than six petabytes of usable storage and more 140 gigabytes per second of sustained aggregate IO performance. Sonexion brings together an integrated file system, software and storage offering that has been designed specifically for a wide range of HPC workloads, providing users with an integrated, scalable Lustre solution that is easy to install and maintain. Cray's Sonexion storage system combines powerful servers, the latest Lustre parallel file system and efficient management software into a modular and scalable storage product that is tested at scale, and supported as a complete solution by Cray.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase procurement is valued at more than $40 million. The system is expected to go into production in 2013.

About NERSC
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which is part of the DOE's Office of Science. The NERSC Center currently serves thousands of scientists at national laboratories and universities across the country researching problems in climate modeling, computational biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines. Established in 1974, the NERSC Center has long been a leader in providing systems, services and expertise to advance computational science throughout the DOE research community. NERSC is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under contract with DOE. For more information about the NERSC Center, go to [ http://www.nersc.gov ].

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science. Visit our website at [ http://www.lbl.gov ].

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 is designed to enable 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 is focused on delivering 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.

Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, including, but not limited to, statements related to Cray's ability to deliver the system required by NERSC when required and that meets NERSC's needs and the planned availability of the Cray Cascade system. These statements involve current expectations, forecasts of future events and other statements that are not historical facts. Inaccurate assumptions and known and unknown risks and uncertainties can affect the accuracy of forward-looking statements and cause results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect future events or results include, but are not limited to, the risk that the system required by NERSC is not delivered in a timely fashion or does not perform as expected, the risk that Cray is not able to successfully complete its planned product development efforts or to ship Cascade systems or next generation Sonexion storage systems within the planned timeframe or at all, the risk that the Cascade system or next generation Sonexion storage system will not have the features or components currently planned, the risk that Intel processors planned for the Cray Cascade system are not available when expected and such other risks as identified in the Company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2012, and from time to time in other reports filed by Cray with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this release. Cray undertakes no duty to publicly announce or report revisions to these statements as new information becomes available that may change the Company's expectations.

Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and Cascade, Cray XE6, Cray Linux Environment, and Sonexion are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.