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DREXLER RECEIVES $3.3 MILLION ORDER FROM ITALY

MOUNTAIN VIEW - Drexler Technology Corporation has received an order valued at $3.3 million for LaserCard optical memory cards slated for use as Italy's new national ID card, called the Carta d'Identita Elettronica (CIE).

The deal brings to $9.5 million the value of orders received under Phase 2 of the CIE program since July of last year. Deliveries under the new order are scheduled to be completed by July.

The Company has delivered optical memory cards valued at $4.8 million under these orders since CIE Phase 2 shipments began in November 2003.

The $3.3 million purchase order was placed by Laser Memory Card SRL, of Rome, Italy, a value-added reseller of Drexler's optical memory cards.

The distribution of the new national ID card, which is in an early stage of implementation, has started in a number of the 56 Italian communities scheduled to be activated under the program this year, according to Italian government sources.

The government's publicly stated plan to issue up to two million cards this year will put Italy at the forefront of European countries in terms of providing their citizens with secure, durable ID documents.

The CIE is built on a LaserCard® optical memory card platform, which includes a 1 megabyte optical stripe, to which a contact IC chip is added in Italy.

The optical memory provides visual and automatic card authentication; a non-alterable audit trail of events (each digitally signed) in the card manufacturing, registration, activation, distribution, and issuance processes; a portable data "vault" containing each citizen's demographics, color photograph, digitized signature, and other biometrics; and back-up should the chip fail.

WORLD'S FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER PLANNED

WASHINGTON, DC - Viewing supercomputers as crucial to scientific discovery, the US Energy Department (DOE) has said it plans to build the world's fastest computer at a research laboratory in Tennessee.

The supercomputer to be built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be funded over the initial two years by federal grants totaling $50 million.
 
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was to make the formal announcement in a speech Wednesday, in which he will call development of the world's fastest computer for general science "critical to our nation's competitiveness."
 
The project submitted by Oak Ridge scientists envisions a computer capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second.

The DOE project will involve Cray Corp., International Business Machines and Silicon Graphics Inc., all private companies that have been deeply involved in high-performance computing research.

The program will attempt to develop a computer that will surpass Japan's Earth Simulator, built by NEC in 2002 and capable of sustaining nearly 36 trillion calculations per second. Some computers have reached many times that speed, but not on a sustained basis.

With the development of the Earth Simulator, many officials believed the US had lost the lead in scientific computation, although US universities and federal research labs still have many of the fastest computers now operating.

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