Cray/Media:        Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538
Cray/Financial:    Bill Gacki, 612/683-7372

ARCO APPLIES CLIENT/SERVER ARCHITECTURE TO OIL
EXPLORATION

Company Selects CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 System for
Modeling and to Handle Several Hundred Gigabytes of
Data

BEAVERTON, Ore., August 29, 1994 -- ARCO geophysicists are
the first to install a CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400)
system to model oil reservoirs and drilling sites, Cray
Research Superservers, a subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc.
(NYSE:CYR), announced today.  ARCO has installed the CS6400
system at its Exploration and Production Technology Center,
Plano, Texas, for seismic data processing to develop computer
models of subsurface terrain.

ARCO is the first customer to acquire a CS6400 system in the
petroleum industry, where Cray Research is a leading supplier
of high-performance UNIX-based computer systems.  

ARCO engineers will use the CS6400 system to process seismic
data on the order of hundreds of billions of bytes (gigabytes) to
help the company improve the efficiency of finding and
extracting oil.  The CS6400 system will be networked to Sun
and SGI workstations and an IBM 3090 mainframe.

"We ran performance benchmarks against other systems and
looked at price/performance, and the CS6400 came out on top,"
said Rich Holmer, manager of ARCO's Geophysical Acquisition
and Processing Department.  "We were one of the first in the
industry to conduct seismic data processing on Cray Research's
parallel vector supercomputer architecture and now we're the
first to use the company's high-performance SMP (symmetric
multiprocessing) systems for this application.  We have a lot of
confidence in the Cray Research staff, their knowledge of our
applications and their commitment to providing long-term
support."

According to John Carlson, the CS6400 line of systems are
well-suited for commercial applications such as data
warehousing, decision support services (DSS), online
transaction processing (OLTP), and multimedia, as well as for
technical applications like seismic data processing.  Because
the system is based on microprocessors, is scalable in compute
and input/output (I/O) capabilities and has a large, shared
central memory, the CS6400 system is an ideal low-cost
solution for multi-user, parallel seismic data processing, he
said. 

"Our longstanding relationship with ARCO has given us the
opportunity to meet ARCO's requirements with several
generations of UNIX-based solutions to complement their
mainframe and workstation environment," said Carlson.  "We
are pleased to extend this tradition with our CS6400 system."

The CS6400 is the world's most scalable SMP computer and the
most powerful SPARC/Solaris compliant system.  Systems are
available with up to 64 processors, up to 16 gigabytes of
memory, five terabytes of online storage and up to 64 I/O
channels.

Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) is a leader in developing and
applying oil and gas technology.  It is the 15th largest oil
company in the world and one of the 25 largest industrial
corporations in the United States.

Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and
services to help solve customers' most challenging problems.