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Microsoft Hitting Another Birdie, Burton Smith To Join Gates' Team.

Chief scientist Burton Smith to leave Cray, in favor of Microsoft.

SEATTLE, WA, Nov 25, 2005 -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) announced that co-founder and Chief Scientist Burton Smith will leave the company to assume a new role at Microsoft Corporation.

Cray president and CEO Peter Ungaro:

"As our Chief Scientist and an important leader of our research and development team, Burton has provided innovation and technical leadership to Cray for many years. We are very proud of the enormous contributions Burton has made to the high performance computing marketplace, and look forward to seeing his ideas leveraged in the broader computing industry."

Burton Smith:

"I have truly enjoyed my long association with Cray and the opportunity to spend many years at the forefront of high performance computing. Although I am excited to pursue a new and very different opportunity at Microsoft, I will miss being part of this talented team and I wish Cray continued success."

Smith will leave Cray on December 7th, and has also resigned in his role as a Director of the company.

Burton Smith is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, he received the Seymour Cray Computing Engineering Award from the IEEE Computer Society and was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

B.Smith founded Tera Computer Co. in 1987 with James Rottsolk. They changed the name to Cray after buying Silicon Graphic Inc.'s Cray supercomputer unit in April 2000.

As the global leader in HPC, Cray provides innovative supercomputing systems that enable scientists and engineers in government, industry and academia to meet both existing and future computational challenges. Building on years of experience in designing, developing, marketing and servicing the world's most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of HPC systems that deliver unrivaled sustained performance on a wide range of applications.