The Cray CX1 supercomputer with Windows HPC Server 2008, priced from $25,000 to about $80,000, is the most affordable supercomputer ever offered by Cray and is designed to be easy to purchase, deploy, operate and upgrade. Purpose-built for offices, laboratories and university departments, the Cray CX1 is the world's highest-performing computer that uses standard office power.

"Cray is pleased to be working with Microsoft to broaden the HPC user community through the powerful combination of the new Cray CX1 and Windows HPC Server 2008", stated Ian Miller, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Cray. "Many companies familiar with the Windows platform can now easily extend that platform to their HPC workloads using the new tools and features available in Windows HPC Server 2008. Cray and Microsoft have worked closely together to ensure that the out-of-the-box experience for users adopting this solution quickly leads to increased productivity."

"Windows HPC Server 2008, in combination with the Cray CX1 supercomputer, will provide outstanding sustained performance on applications", stated Vince Mendillo, director, HPC at Microsoft Corporation. "This combined solution will enable companies in various sectors to unify their Windows desktop and server work flows. Many Microsoft financial services customers, for example, want to unify back-office modelling and simulation with the work of front-office trading desks."

Windows HPC Server 2008 improves developer's productivity through the integration with Visual Studio 2008 which provides a comprehensive parallel programming environment for Windows HPC Server. In addition to supporting standard interfaces such as OpenMP, MPI, and Web Services, Windows HPC Server also supports third-party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, compilers and debugging toolkits.