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Seattle, WA – March 30, 2009 – Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq GM: CRAY) announced today that the Cray CX1™ deskside supercomputer will now ship with the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series, formerly code-named "Nehalem." Intel's new generation of intelligent processors accelerates performance, saves energy and features more than three times greater memory bandwidth than the previous-generation dual-socket architecture.

Click here to read the press release

That said, I tend to think blogs that are just product commercials are a bit dull –if you want to know all about the Cray CX1 feel free to visit our web site! – so let me use this blog to discuss our partnership with Intel and why we hope it evolves into something really significant for the HPC community.

I hope any of you reading this are familiar with Cray and the heritage we inherited from Seymour Cray and his pioneering work in supercomputers. For many years Cray has been at the forefront of supercomputer technology and in many minds the name is synonymous with that technology. However, building supercomputers is just a part of the equation. Working with customers who have the vision and the determination to use that technology to further mankind's knowledge is the element that turns interesting technology into something truly meaningful. We work closely with all of our customers who keep us on our toes – pushing us to find innovative solutions that address their scientific or research needs – both large and small.

In order to address those needs we began collaborating with Intel in 2007 and formally announced our partnership in early 2008. Intel has some of the finest minds in processor technology on the planet and Cray brings a wealth of experience in this area as well, especially as applied to high performance computing. We are working together on technologies that will push the petaflops capabilities that Cray already proved in 2008 – to the next level.

I am confident this partnership will deliver these capabilities and see the new Xeon processors as a significant step forward on this journey. With these new processors and the affordable Cray CX1, more people can leverage this technology, which makes it all the more exciting! So whether your budget is $25,000 or has some significant additional zeroes, Cray and Intel will be able to support your mission goals with technology that continues to push supercomputing to the next generation. I’d like to congratulate Intel on their latest release and look forward to our continued collaboration. In future blogs in this space I will take you through some examples of how Cray and Intel technology are addressing real world HPC needs today.

It’s cool to see hardware partners’ eyes light up when they first experience the tight integration Clustercorp’s engineers have built between Rocks+ and Intel Cluster Ready. One of our principal goals when we entered the program was to extend the Rocks mantra of “making clusters easy” to the Intel Cluster Ready spec.  We’ve seen vendors struggle for weeks with other solutions sit down with Rocks+ for the first time, and build Intel Cluster Ready systems in about an hour – this is a true testament to the power of the open source Rocks framework and the design of the Intel Cluster Ready Roll spearheaded by Jason Bishop at Clustercorp.

We are looking forward to a continued ramp in end-user adoption of Intel Cluster Ready in ’09 and increased interaction with the other ISVs in the program.  In the second half of ‘08 we started seeing more ISVs leverage our work with Rocks+ as a base to build their Intel Cluster Ready codes.  As a former HPC end-user, I dreamed of the day a cluster would be delivered to my lab fully-configured, with a standards-based cluster management platform, and most of my developer tools or applications ready to run…  I expect there are a lot of eager HPC sys admins waiting to get their hands on Intel’s new architecture – our aim is to make their new cluster purchases and continued administration of their systems as pleasant and efficient as possible.