Cray closes UK HPC deal, announces quarterly profit

Cray announced yesterday that they’ve just signed a contract to deliver a hybrid Opteron/vector system to the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) High End Computing Terascale Resources (HECToR), a large HPC initiative in Europe.

The new supercomputer will be installed at the University of Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) in Edinburgh, Scotland, in stages over the next two years. It will serve a broad community of academic users across the UK.

The HECToR folks bought the whole roadmap, too: Cray’s next gen MPP, “Baker”, is also part of the deal and will be installed in 2009.

Cray has had a good week, also reporting yesterday a net operating profit in the fourth quarter of 2006 ($0.33 per share compared to a net loss of $0.42 per share in the fourth quarter of 2005).