SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Nov 16, 2015) - Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the Company has been awarded a contract to provide the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) with a Cray® CS400™ cluster supercomputer. Headquartered in Bremerhaven, Germany, AWI is one of the country's premier research institutes within the Helmholtz Association, and is an internationally respected center of expertise for polar and marine research.

The contract with AWI is the Company's first for a Cray® CS™ cluster supercomputer featuring the new Intel® Omni-Path Architecture. The system will also include next-generation Intel® Xeon® processors, which are the follow on to the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 product family, formerly code-named "Haswell."

Named after the German polar explorer who discovered the continental drift, the Alfred Wegener Institute explores nearly all aspects of the earth system -- from the atmosphere to the ocean floor. The Institute's work leverages field research in extreme conditions, cutting-edge laboratory equipment, and high performance supercomputing systems to better understand the polar and marine environments, ecosystems and their interaction and influence on the earth's climate system. AWI will use its new Cray CS400 cluster supercomputer to run advanced research applications related to climate and environmental studies, including global circulations models, regional atmospheric models, and other computing-intensive, numerical simulations.

"The new Cray HPC System will become the most innovative part of the AWI computing infrastructure and will further strengthen the position of our science and research activities," said Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hiller, head of the AWI computing centre. "It will enable researchers at our institute to model the earth system and its components more efficiently with higher resolution and accuracy. It is also a new landmark in the long cooperation of the AWI computing centre with Cray, reaching back to the days when a Cray T3E system was one of our major work horses. That system led to major scientific results in modelling and understanding the Antarctic circumpolar current and the exchange of water masses between the world oceans in the Antarctic. Hence, we are looking forward to new exiting scientific research results which will be produced with the new system."

"The Alfred Wegener Institute is world renowned for innovative research aimed at solving the monumental scientific challenges associated with polar and marine research," said Catalin Morosanu, Cray's vice president of sales for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. "As a leader in providing supercomputing systems for prominent earth sciences centers around the world, we take great pride in building computational tools that allow our customers to achieve scientific breakthroughs. We are honored that a highly-regarded organization such as the Alfred Wegener Institute has selected a Cray supercomputer to power its important research."

The Cray CS400 system at AWI -- along with future Cray CS cluster supercomputers -- will be available with the new Intel® Omni-Path Architecture, a next-generation, high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric specifically designed for high performance computing systems. Intel's Omni-Path Architecture, an element of the Intel® Scalable System Framework, is designed for performance and efficiency for a range of challenging workloads.

"Intel is proud to collaborate with Cray on this significant achievement, bringing a system using Intel Omni-Path Architecture and the Intel Scalable System Framework to AWI to support critically important climate research at unprecedented scale," said Charles Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of HPC Platform Group at Intel. "Our companies have built a strong partnership based on introducing new technologies that provide powerful computational tools for supercomputing users. We are pleased that Cray is one of the early adopters of the Intel Omni-Path Architecture, and adding this new technology to the CS400 systems will create a compelling solution for Cray customers."

The Cray CS400 cluster supercomputers are scalable, flexible systems built from optimized, industry-standard building block server platforms into a unified, fully-integrated system. Available with air or liquid-cooled architectures, Cray CS400 systems provide superior price/performance, energy efficiency and configuration flexibility. The Cray CS400 systems are integrated with Cray's HPC software stack and include software tools compatible with most open source and commercial compilers, schedulers, and libraries.

Valued at more than $3 million -- and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the federal states of Bremen, Brandenburg and Schleswig-Holstein -- the Cray CS400 system for AWI is expected to be delivered in 2016.

For more information on the Cray CS400 cluster supercomputers, please visit the Cray website at www.cray.com.

About Cray Inc.
 Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) provides innovative systems and solutions enabling scientists and engineers in industry, academia and government to meet existing and future simulation and analytics challenges. Leveraging more than 40 years of experience in developing and servicing the world's most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers and big data storage and analytics solutions delivering unrivaled performance, efficiency and scalability. 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 meet 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 AWI when required and that meets AWI's needs. 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 actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect actual future events or results include, but are not limited to, the risk that the system required by AWI 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 in a timely fashion or at all, the risk that processors and fabric planned for the AWI system are not available or incorporated into the Cray CS400 system when expected or at all and such other risks as identified in the Company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2015, 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 CS400 and CS are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.