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Cray Awarded Contract to Upgrade Cray Systems at Germany's National Meteorological Service

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Apr 5, 2016) - Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the Company has signed a contract to upgrade and expand the Cray® XC™ supercomputers and Cray® Sonexion® storage systems at Germany's National Meteorological Service - the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Located in Offenbach, Germany, DWD is one of the world's premier numerical weather prediction centers.

The upgraded Cray systems will allow DWD to continue to improve its highly-complex models for providing more accurate weather forecasts for a wide array of weather responsibilities. With the significant increase in compute performance and storage capacity, the researchers and scientists at DWD will be able to apply more advanced supercomputing technologies towards its mission of meeting the meteorological requirements arising from all areas of economy and society in Germany.

"Supercomputers are absolutely vital to our mission of providing important meteorological services for the protection of life and property," said Dr. Jochen Dibbern, Member of the Executive Board at DWD. "Our Cray supercomputers are critical tools for our researchers and scientists, and it's imperative that we equip our users with highly advanced supercomputing technologies."

"We are honored that DWD has once again turned to Cray to deliver the additional compute power and storage capacity necessary for running more complex numerical weather predictions," said Dominik Ulmer, Cray's vice president of operations for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. "As the clear leader in building supercomputers for the world's top numerical weather prediction centers, we take great pride in knowing that important weather forecasts across the globe are run on Cray supercomputers. We are proud of our partnership with DWD and we are pleased it will continue."

In January 2013, Cray announced it was awarded a contract to provide DWD with two Cray® XC30™ supercomputers and two Cray Sonexion storage systems. Under the terms of this new contract, Cray will upgrade and expand the supercomputers at DWD to Cray® XC40™ systems, which will include the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family.

As part of this upgrade, DWD will also receive additional Cray Sonexion 2000 scale-out Lustre storage capacity, and a future 12-node Cray® CS400™ system with the next-generation of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor.

The Cray XC series of supercomputers, along with the Cray® CS™ line of cluster supercomputers and the Cray® CS-Storm™ systems, are now available with the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 product family. The new processors enable peak performance boosts of up to 30 percent for new and existing Cray XC and Cray CS systems over previous generations.