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Microsoft and Cray Team Up to Drive High Productivity Computing Into the Mainstream
(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SEATTLE, WA and REDMOND, WA, September 16 / MARKET WIRE/ --
Supercomputer leader Cray Inc.
(NASDAQ: CRAY) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) today introduced
the new Cray CX1 supercomputer pre-installed with Windows HPC Server 2008.
With U.S. list prices starting at $25,000 to over $60,000,
"ease-of-everything" features and the ability to fit into standard office
environments and workflows, the new product reflects Microsoft and Cray's
shared goal to drive high productivity computing farther into the
mainstream in a broad array of markets including financial services,
aerospace, automotive, petroleum, life sciences, government, academic and
digital media.
Studies released by the Council on Competitiveness and the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that nearly all large firms using
HPC consider it indispensable for their ability to compete and survive, but
smaller companies, as well as workgroups and departments in larger firms,
have been hampered by the cost of HPC systems and a lack of access to
in-house experts to help them use these systems.
The Cray CX1 supercomputer was designed from the ground up to address these
barriers. It is the most affordable supercomputer ever offered by Cray and
is designed to be easy to purchase, deploy, operate and upgrade.
Purpose-built for offices, laboratories and university departments, the
Cray CX1 is the world's highest-performing computer that uses standard
office power.
The Cray CX1 product incorporates up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon
processors, either dual or quad core; delivers up to 64 gigabytes of memory
per node; and provides up to 4 terabytes of internal storage. Systems can
be configured with a mix of compute, storage and visualization blades to
meet customers' individual requirements. The quiet, deskside supercomputer
features Windows HPC Server 2008 and interoperates with Linux. A
three-year warranty with next-day, on-site Cray-certified support is
standard.
"Windows HPC Server 2008, in combination with the Cray CX1 supercomputer,
will provide outstanding sustained performance on applications," said Vince
Mendillo, director, HPC at Microsoft Corp. "This combined solution will
enable companies in various sectors to unify their Windows desktop and
server workflows. Many Microsoft financial services customers, for example,
want to unify back-office modeling and simulation with the work of
front-office trading desks."
"IDC research shows that HPC has been one of the highest-growth IT markets
during the past five years and the segment for HPC systems priced below
$100,000 is headed for continued growth," said Earl Joseph, IDC's HPC
program vice president. "The Cray HPC brand name and experience, combined
with Microsoft's strategy of extending the familiar Windows environment
upward to the server level, gives the Cray CX1 solution strong potential
for exploiting the anticipated growth of this market segment."
"Cray sees Microsoft Windows becoming an increasingly important force in
the HPC market," said Ian Miller, senior vice president of sales and
marketing at Cray. "With the Cray CX1 high productivity system and Windows
HPC Server 2008, we're bringing the power of Cray supercomputing to a much
wider range of new users with an affordable and adaptable system that
provides incredible value and is easy to install, program and use with a
broad array of applications from independent software vendors (ISVs)."
The Cray CX1 high productivity system is also the first Cray product to
incorporate Intel processors and the first milestone of the unique
collaboration Cray and Intel announced in April to develop a range of HPC
systems and technologies over the next several years to address various
segments of the HPC industry.
"Taking advantage of the energy-efficient performance of the Intel Xeon
processor 5400 series, Cray's CX1 system will bring many HPC capabilities
to the office that were previously confined to the datacenter, enabling
more users to employ supercomputing to help them solve some of their most
difficult computational problems," said Richard Dracott, Intel's General
Manager of High Performance Computing, "In addition, we continue to
collaborate with Cray on developing the supercomputing technologies of the
future, aimed at all segments of the HPC market."
Scientists at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA plan to use a Cray
CX1 with Microsoft HPC Server 2008 for mathematical modeling and
visualization. This will support their development of advanced
computational algorithms and scientific approaches for the comprehensive
and quantitative mapping of brain structure and function.
"We are very excited about utilizing the Cray CX1 to support our research
activities," said Rico Magsipoc, Chief Technology Officer for the
Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. "The work that we do in brain research is
computationally intensive but will ultimately have a huge impact on our
understanding of the relationship between brain structure and function, in
both health and disease. Having the power of a Cray supercomputer that is
simple and compact is very attractive and necessary, considering the
physical constraints we face in our data centers today."
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize
their full potential.
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 CX1 is a trademark of Cray Inc.
Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of
their respective owners.
Editor's Note: Quotes from leading independent software vendors (ISVs) and
an early customer appear on the following pages.
ISVs and Early Customer Quote Page
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
"PNNL is delighted to be an early customer for the Cray CX1. We intend to
use this system as a test-bed for several important applications running in
a Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 environment. The Cray CX1's small
physical size makes it ideal for workgroup computing," said Dr. Moe
Khaleel, Lab Fellow and Director, Computational Sciences & Mathematics
Division of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
"We intend to use the Cray CX1 to run environmental modeling simulations as
part of the Performance Assessment Institute (PAI) consortium led by
Sandia National Laboratory in conjunction with UNLV. The CX1 is of
particular interest to us because of its ability to support Windows-based
applications like GoldSim," said Joe Lombardo, Director, National
Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment (NSCEE) at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Milliman
"With Milliman's Windows-based MG-ALFA? financial projection tool now
available on the new, office-ready Cray CX1 supercomputer, the opportunity
to dramatically speed up or expand the analysis associated with projections
and product pricing is available to everyone," said Pat Renzi, Milliman
MG-ALFA Product Manager and Principal. "We see significant opportunity with
the Milliman-Microsoft-Cray combination as it reduces the financial and
human resource cost of accessing a supercomputing environment."
Interactive Supercomputing, Inc.
"STAR-P boosts productivity of domain experts by making it dramatically
easier to parallelize applications for high performance computers, using
MATLAB or Python. The Cray CX1 supercomputer promises to expand the market
for STAR-P through its unprecedented affordability and ease-of-use, in
combination with Cray-certified quality and service," said David Rich, VP
of Marketing at Interactive Supercomputing, Inc.
Intelligent Light
"FieldView is the leading post-processing software tool to help CFD
practitioners understand scientific and engineering data and communicate
results. The affordable, easy-to-use Cray CX1 supercomputer will allow even
small firms and workgroups to effectively address the large data bottleneck
in HPC enabled CFD workflows as they post-process and visualize
supercomputer-size data with FieldView," said Roger R. Rintala, Strategic
Marketing Manager at Intelligent Light.
CD-Adapco
"Our STAR-CCM+ solution on the new Cray CX1 supercomputer will make
advanced engineering simulations affordable and easy to run even for those
who are new to high performance computing," said David Vaughn, Director,
Marketing/Aerospace and Defense Sector. "We're pleased to extend our
long-standing collaboration with an industry leader such as Cray."
SIMULIA
"SIMULIA, the Dassault Syst?mes brand for realistic simulation, and Cray
have collaborated closely for decades to keep the performance of Abaqus FEA
software running on Cray supercomputers in the forefront of the HPC
industry," said Matt Dunbar, SIMULIA's Performance and Parallel Technology
Area Leader. "The new, cost-effective Cray CX1 supercomputer provides HPC
capabilities to a wider range of simulation users. The engineering
community will now have access to the compute power needed to run large
finite element analysis (FEA) and multiphysics engineering models quickly
and affordably."
CEI
"The Cray CX1 workgroup supercomputer is needed in the engineering market.
In 2007, we shopped around for a system like this that is easy to specify,
buy, configure, use, and upgrade, and nothing fit the bill," said Darin
McGinnis, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at CEI. "This will be a
good fit for our EnSight visualization software."
Altair Engineering
"PBS Professional on the affordable new Cray CX1 supercomputer will make
job submission and workload scheduling easy for scientists, designers,
financial analysts and engineers across all environments. In an era of
shrinking budgets, this joint solution will enable administrators to get
maximum value from computing resources through greater efficiency and
utilization." said Bill Nitzberg, CTO, PBS GridWorks, Altair Engineering.
"In addition, combining RADIOSS, Altair's next-generation multidisciplinary
finite-element solver, will provide improved simulation quality and speed
for advanced product development. We look forward to expanding our
successful and long-standing relationship with Cray and work together to
make PBS Professional and RADIOSS available on the Cray CX1."
Cluster Resources
"The affordable Cray CX1 supercomputer will make Cray's renowned
supercomputing standards available to more people than ever before," stated
Michael Jackson, president of Cluster Resources. "We are pleased to expand
our successful partnership with Cray to desktop supercomputing through the
Cray CX1 that can dynamically switch between Windows HPC Server 2008 and
Linux. Moab on Cray's CX1 will increase flexibility and productivity and
decrease costs for organizations in scheduling, managing, monitoring, and
reporting on Windows, Linux, or mixed-OS workloads."
ANSYS
"ANSYS is very pleased to be working with Cray on performance benchmarking
of the new Cray CX1 supercomputer, which should be an excellent solution
for our customers doing increasingly detailed and sophisticated engineering
simulation. The engineered scalability of ANSYS technology enables users to
see outstanding performance from the desktop all the way to high
performance supercomputers such as the Cray CX1," said Chris Reid, vice
president of marketing for ANSYS, Inc. "Cray's focus on industry standards
is consistent with our open strategy and makes this an affordable,
easy-to-use solution that will help our users boost their productivity and
bring superior products to market faster."
Platform Computing
"Through our partnership with Red Hat, Platform Computing has joined with
industry pioneer and leader Cray Inc. to offer Cray CX1 customers the
option to easily deploy, run and manage the entire life cycle of its
cluster with the Red Hat HPC Solution," said Tripp Purvis, Vice President,
Business Development at Platform Computing. "The Red Hat HPC Solution is a
fully integrated, easy-to-deploy, Linux-based software stack leveraging the
powerful cluster software framework of Platform Open Cluster Stack 5 and
the world-class performance, security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux."
Contact:
Cray Media:
Steve Conway
651/592-7441pr@cray.com
Microsoft:
Tina Couch
425/703-7185tcouch@microsoft.com
Cray Investors:
Paul Hiemstra
206/701-2044ir@cray.com
Copyright ? 2008 Marketwire
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