Top UK Researchers Achieve Breakthrough Science on Cray Supercomputer

SEATTLE, WA, Oct 23 (MARKET WIRE) --
Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that
researchers in the United Kingdom (UK) are already achieving breakthrough
science in a number of key disciplines using the powerful and highly
scalable Cray XT4 supercomputer that was unveiled in January 2008 as part
of the UK's High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) project.
Housed at the University of Edinburgh, the Cray supercomputer forms the
basis for the UK's national high performance computing (HPC) service
established as part of the HECToR project to enable scientific
breakthroughs and advancements among the nation's academic community.

In the short time since it was introduced, UK researchers have documented
a number of scientific advancements using the Cray XT4 system. Running a
number of high resolution simulations at rapid speeds, the supercomputer
has enabled researchers to gain a deeper understanding of important
scientific phenomena in the fields of materials engineering, fluid
dynamics and physics. These critical research projects include
determining the composition of eggshell and how it's manufactured, the
ease of turbulence creation using fractal grids, how ultra-fast lasers
cut through targets without damaging tissue and the temperature of the
Earth's core.

-- Simulating the temperature of the Earth's core. Professor Dario Alfe
and colleagues from the University College in London first computed the
temperature of the Earth's core in the late 1990s using the capacity of the
supercomputers available at the time. The significantly advanced computing
power of the HECToR Cray XT4 system has enabled Alfe to employ a more
accurate method and reduce errors of his earlier calculation. The
temperature of the Earth's core, which is molten iron under very high
pressure, cannot be measured directly. Because of this, experiments have
traditionally relied on recreating core conditions in the laboratory, an
activity that is extremely complex and leads to highly variable
experimental results. The HECToR results lend support to theoretical
techniques and will help guide future experiments. "This is something I'd
wanted to do for a long time, but couldn't because there wasn't enough
computing power. The Cray system is a fantastic machine -- the best so far,
making this experiment possible," said Professor Alfe. The research team
calculated the Earth's core at 6500 +/-400C.

-- Understanding the composition of eggshell and how it's manufactured.
John Harding from Sheffield University used the HECToR system to simulate
how protein and water molecules interact to form nanoscale-sized particles
of calcium carbonate to create the structure of eggshell. Scientists
believe that mechanisms by which chickens and other organic systems produce
calcium carbonate -- a component of rocks such as calcite and limestone --
may be recreated to design new materials with useful properties. This
project required many individual computer simulations, each involving
hundreds of thousands of atoms, to understand how the molecules and
particles interact. "What we've come to understand is the how and the why --
how proteins control the structure of calcium carbonate and why eggshell
has the properties it does," said Harding. "We couldn't have undertaken a
project of this size without HECToR and the Cray supercomputer."

-- Understanding how to create turbulence more efficiently using fractal
grids. Chemical and food manufacturing industries use turbulence for mixing
ingredients while some industries, like the aerospace and automotive
industries, focus on reducing the negative effects of turbulence including
noise and fuel consumption. Fractal grids have been shown to create
turbulence with very little motion or energy and small changes to the grid
have been shown to have an enormous effect on maximizing or reducing
turbulence. Professor Christos Vassilicos of Imperial College in London
conducted a number of simulations which allowed him to better understand
the efficiency of fractal grids on turbulence production. "There is no way
I could have run these simulations before HECToR. I plan to conduct
additional simulations to further shed light on how fractal grids impact
turbulence and how industries can leverage this knowledge."

-- Understanding how ultra-fast lasers cut through cancer cells without
damaging tissue. High-power, ultra-fast lasers are under development for
many uses, including cancer treatment, because of their ability to cut
through precision targets like cancer cells without damaging tissue.
Professor Ken Taylor of Queen's University in Belfast used 8,000 cores of
the HECToR Cray XT4 system to better understand their ability to do this.
Taylor employed fundamental physics to simulate the interaction of light at
various wavelengths and intensities using helium, one of the smallest
atoms. "We've been able to build and solve a mathematical model of a real
system using the Cray supercomputer. In future simulations, we will look at
light of even shorter wavelengths including the x-ray range. Before HECToR,
we couldn't go to shorter wavelengths or even simulate interactions at
longer wavelengths for a wide range of light intensities. HECToR and Cray
have allowed us to significantly advance the science in this field and I
look forward to what we'll be able to achieve in the future."

"The HECToR Cray XT4 system has been in service less than a year and
yet has already enabled users to tackle larger scientific problems than
ever before with some great new results," said Ulla Thiel, vice president
of Cray Europe. "And the value-added Cray Centre of Excellence at HECToR
at the University of Edinburgh along with the Computational Science and
Engineering support provided by the Numerical Algorithms Group has made
available the performance and application support that the UK academic
community needs to tackle new areas of science and drive toward true
capability computing. We are very encouraged by these early results and
expect great things from the HECToR Cray XT4 in the future."

Researchers in the UK continue to use the Cray XT4 system in the HECToR
program to further advance science in a variety of fields. Current
experiments include the following:

-- Dr Richard Sandberg, University of Southampton, is pursuing numerical
(compute-based) investigation of aircraft aerofoil noise. The project
focuses on running large-scale simulations of turbulent flow over airfoils
in order to detect additional noise sources other than trailing-edge noise.
The data also is intended to help verify and improve noise prediction
models. This work is very important, as noise generation at takeoff and
landing is a major design consideration in modern aircraft.

-- Professor Richard Catlow of the Materials Chemistry Consortium is
working to improve the scalability of CASTEP, a software package used to
calculate the properties of solids and surfaces. A new version of CASTEP
developed for HECToR allows scaling to processor counts many times greater
than was previously possible, using the Cray XT high performance
interconnect. Professor Catlow's materials group will use this new
technology to apply unprecedented amounts of computer power for this type
of scientific problem.

-- Dr. K. Stratford of the Soft Matter and Statistical Physics Group and
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at The University of Edinburgh is
studying the properties of liquid crystals to understand how their
structure can play an important role in determining their useful
properties. Dr. Stratford is using up to 8,192 processors of HECToR's Cray
XT4 system to run individual calculations, allowing the study of very large
system sizes which are not subject to the errors that arise in small system
sizes. It is hoped that this work will ultimately help improve the design
of products such as liquid crystal displays.

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.

Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray XT4, Cray XT and Cray XT3 are
trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein
are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Cray Media:
Steve Conway
651/592-7441
sttico@aol.com

Cray Investors:
Paul Hiemstra
206/701-2044
ir@cray.com

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