Got $500,000 to spare? Seattle supercomputer maker Cray today introduced what is calling "midrange supercomputers" that start at half a million dollars. Cray's new energy-efficient XT5m product line is cheaper than its other products which are used at national labs and other research institutions.

Cray is hoping that the new product will expand its market. And it already has landed one customer for the XT5m: The High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. The university plans to use the supercomputer to analyze simulations from automobile crash tests.

Here are the technical details of the new product:

The CrayXT5m system incorporates a version of the Cray SeaStar(TM) network specially designed and optimized for systems with peak performance of less than 100 teraflops. This provides Cray XT5m systems with superior bandwidth, upgradeability and manageability at price points similar to those of commodity clusters. Offered with up to six cabinets, the Cray XT5m series features Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors and a Cray SeaStar-based 2D torus interconnect. The Cray Linux Environment(TM) enables the use of a wide range of open source tools as well as streamlined porting of a broad set of applications from independent software vendors (ISVs).