Cray beats drum ahead of financial results announcement

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Cray is slated to announce its Q4 and FY2009 earnings next Tuesday. Ahead of that announcement it is talking up the success of its XT?m line, the company’s midrange line of supers. You may recall that Cray announced preliminarily neutral financial results early last month.

Cray logoAs momentum builds for its line of midrange supercomputing systems, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that new customers in Japan, Europe and the United States have purchased midrange supercomputing systems from Cray. With the same scalable design and petascale architecture included in the world’s fastest supercomputer, but configured and offered at lower price points, the Cray XT5m and Cray XT6m systems are generating new business wins for Cray in the university, weather, life sciences, and government research and development communities.

Among the early customers for the XT6m are the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, first Japanese customer, and the University of Duisburg-Essen, the first German customer.

The Cray XT6m is the company’s second generation of its midrange supercomputer designed to effectively scale down Cray’s high-end systems while providing the same benefits to an expanded base of users. Upgradeable from a Cray XT5m, the Cray XT6m includes compute blades that feature four compute nodes designed for high scalability in a small footprint and can be configured with up to 96 dual-socket nodes per cabinet. Each compute node is composed of two AMD Opteron(TM) 6100 Series processors (the eight and 12-core “Maranello” platform), each coupled with its own memory and dedicated Cray Seastar2+ interconnect. The compute nodes in the Cray XT6m systems can also be configured with 32 GB or 64 GB DDR3 memory.

Although we won’t know whether this is the case this time, it is not uncommon for company’s to try to get good news out just ahead of unfavorable financial reports. We’ll know next week.