Cray land £120 million contract: shares rise 10 percent

Cray, the famous American supercomputer organisation have landed a $188 million (£120) contract with the University of Illinois to provide a supercomputer for the ‘Blue Waters' project – only 3 months after IBM pulled out.

This news is a much needed injection for the company who achieved a 10 percent share increase after the news was released.

The Blue Waters project requires a supercomputer that can handle a sustained performance level of 1 petaflop, or a quadrillion instructions per second. The Cray model could end up one of the most powerful computers on the planet. IBM originally were involved but pulled out due to logistics issues.

Cray are due to build the computer around AMD's Opteron and Nvidia's Tesla series of hardware. It will be installed in phases during the first nine months of 2012 at the university's National Petascale Computing facility, according to company reports issued Monday.

Cray are on a roll, as this is the second high profile supercomputer they have been commissioned to build in the space of 4 weeks. The other is a $97 million contract to upgrade the Cray XT5 ‘Jaguar' supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Kitguru says: Cray claim that they are on track for a $350 million revenue in 2012 if their projections hold true. Gross margins should be in the 35 percent range.

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