Ford Installs Two More Cray SV1 Supercomputers

4 August 2000

Ford Installs Two More Cray SV1 Supercomputers

    SEATTLE - Cray Inc. today announced that Ford Motor Company recently acquired two additional Cray SV1 supercomputers, making it the company's largest Cray SV1 customer with a total of five systems. Ford will use the new machines to perform safety and structural analysis and speed time to market for its latest vehicle models. Financial terms were not disclosed.

    These new systems give Ford a total of 80 Cray SV1 processors and 102 gigabytes of memory. Like Ford's other three Cray SV1 supercomputers, they replace existing Cray J90(TM) machines and provide additional computing power. One of the new systems is housed at Ford's product development center in Dunton, England, while the other, used as a file server, is located within Ford's data center in Dearborn, Mich.

    Ford's fleet of Cray SV1 systems run NASTRAN and RADIOSS applications, which its engineers use to simulate the crash worthiness of new vehicle designs and run noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) tests. This process allows Ford to reduce the need for costly prototypes and accelerate the development cycle.

    "Ford's continued commitment to Cray technology and the UNICOS operating environment reinforces Cray's dominance in the manufacturing industry - one of our key market segments," said Rene Copeland, Cray Inc. vice president of sales and marketing. "We're honored to serve customers like Ford, whose insatiable appetite for real-world computational power pushes us to deliver superior systems."

    The Cray SV1 product line combines world-class single-processor performance with outstanding price/performance, scalability from entry-level to teraflops-level sizes and the ability to run an industry-leading library of third-party vector applications. Named "Supercomputer Product of the Year" by Scientific Computing and Automation magazine in 1999, the Cray SV1 supercomputer will be succeeded by the company's next-generation Cray SV2(TM) system in 2002.

    About Cray Inc.

    Cray Inc. designs, builds and sells high-performance vector processor and general-purpose parallel computer systems. The company has leading edge technology, multiple product platforms, nearly 900 employees, a $2 billion installed base of over 600 computers worldwide, major manufacturing and service capabilities and extensive global customer relationships. Cray believes its Multithreaded Architecture and Cray T3E(TM) and SV2 systems together represent the future of supercomputing. Go to www.cray.com for more information on the company.