Profile: Cray Inc. (CRAY.O)

Cray Inc., incorporated in 1987, designs, develops, manufactures, markets and services high-performance computing (HPC) systems, commonly known as supercomputers. The Company sells its products primarily through a direct sales force that operates throughout the United States and in Canada, Europe, Japan and Asia-Pacific. Its supercomputer systems are installed at more than 100 sites in over 20 countries. The Company has concentrated on building balanced systems that are purpose-built for supercomputer users. The Company’s supercomputers allow users to address scientific and engineering computing problems.

Cray XT5 System

The Cray XT5 system is a massively parallel processing (MPP) system, which was introduced in November 2007. Customers can upgrade to the Cray XT5 system from Cray XT3 or Cray XT4 systems and/or add on to the existing Cray XT systems. XT5 cabinets can be configured with Cray XT4 compute blades, for optimized compute-to-communication balance, or with new high-density Cray XT5 compute blades for memory-intensive and/or compute-biased workloads. Its Linux-based operating system supports a broader range of applications.

Cray XT4 System

The Company’s Cray XT4 system combines the capabilities of the Company’s Cray XT3 system and many features of its Cray XD1 system to provide a next generation massively parallel processor supercomputer system. Its Cray XT4 system uses Dual-Core and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors running a lightweight Linux operating system and connected to its second-generation, high-speed network.

Cray XT5h Hybrid Supercomputer

The Cray XT5h system is an integrated hybrid supercomputer that takes the scalar processing capability of the Cray XT5 system and adds vector processing and reconfigurable field programmable gate array hardware acceleration, allowing a single system to provide a variety of processing technologies for diverse workflows. The vector compute blades called Cray X2 blades provide the vector processing capabilities enabled by its BlackWidow development program.

Cray CX1 System

The Cray CX1 system, purpose-built for offices, laboratories and university departments requiring systems principally in the workgroup server market segment, incorporates up to eight nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors, either dual or quad core. Up to three chassis can be linked with the optional 24-port Infiniband switch allowing for easy expansion to 192 cores. Systems can be configured with a mix of compute, storage and visualization blades to meet customers’ individual requirements.

Cray XT5m System

The Company’s Cray XT5m midrange supercomputer is designed to make its HPC technology available to more users by targeting the lower end of the supercomputer market segment and the high end of the divisional server market segment. The CrayXT5m system incorporates a version of its Cray SeaStar network. Offered with up to six cabinets, the Cray XT5m series features many-core AMD Opteron processors and can be air or liquid cooled through use of Cray ECOphlex technology.

Cray XMT System

The Company’s Cray XMT program is directed at developing a third-generation multithreaded supercomputer, which offers global shared memory and high latency tolerance, with 128 threads per processor. The Cray XMT system utilizes the Company’s Cray XT infrastructure.

Baker

The Company’s Baker program is directed at creating the successor to its Cray XT5 system and extending its position in massively parallel computing. The Baker system will utilize a new high-performance interconnect that combines technologies of the Cray XT and Cray XD1 systems and will integrate next generation many-core processors in a choice of air or liquid-cooled (ECOphlex) cabinets.

The Company competes with IBM, NEC, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Hitachi, Fujitsu, SGI, Dell, Bull S.A. and Sun Microsystems.