Media: Steve Conway 612-683-7133 Financial: Bill Gacki 612-683-7372 CRAY RESEARCH SUPERSERVER IS SELECTED TO AUTOMATE MANUFACTURING, DISTRIBUTION AT SOUTH CENTRAL L.A. BOTTLING PLANT BEAVERTON, Ore., September 27, 1994 -- Neighborhood Beverage Corporation, a start-up bottling plant in South Central Los Angeles, has selected a CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 system to run the company's manufacturing, order entry, accounting and distribution operations, Cray Research Superservers, a subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR) announced today. Financial terms were not disclosed. Housed in a former 7Up bottling plant in South Central Los Angeles, Neighborhood Beverage was formed by brothers Byron and Calvin Jamerson to employ local residents and supply area grocers with a variety of soft drinks. The bottling plant is expected to begin operations next year and eventually employ up to 250 area residents. "When we set out to select a computer to run the bottling plant and the business, we needed a single machine that could handle everything from manufacturing operations to order entry and distribution," said Byron M. Jamerson. "We chose the Cray Research Superserver because it could look at multiple forms of data and process that data faster and at a lower cost than anything else available." The CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) system will run Oracle database management and financial software, and a manufacturing and process control software package from Fourth Shift Inc. called Just In Time (JIT). Neighborhood Beverage will install a 16-processor superserver with one gigabyte of memory and 30 gigabytes of disk space, and plans to expand the system to 64 processors over time. Running on the CS6400 system, the Oracle and JIT software will track all business operations such as sales leads, order entry and distribution, tracking a bar-coded product from the time it comes off the line to its delivery at the customer site. The CS6400 system will also run process control systems that dictate what happens on the manufacturing line, from sampling for formula accuracy to speeding or slowing the bottling process. "To compete with mass market soft drink products, the most important requirement is to have product consistency," said Jamerson. "The first can must taste exactly like the next. That means complete quality assurance. The CS6400 is able to run our process control software at tremendous speeds, as well as handle our full order entry and distribution database management systems and other business applications." Jamerson said that the company looked at symmetric multiprocessor systems (SMP) and massively parallel systems (MPP) to run the Oracle and JIT applications. "The CS6400 offered the best of both -- it would readily run the Oracle and JIT applications and provided a natural migration to grow the system within the same architecture," said Jamerson. "We're proud to partner with Neighborhood Beverage and look forward to a long-term alliance," said Martin Buchanan, general manager of Cray Research Superservers. "We are committed to providing the solutions necessary to help Neighborhood Beverage achieve its goals. Their need for a single, high- performance platform to run multiple business systems is an example of the type of commercial application for which the CS6400 system is especially well suited." Cray Research Superservers, based in Beaverton, Oregon, is a subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc. Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. Data warehousing, decision support, transaction processing and multimedia applications are the target for Cray Research's new line of highly scalable SMP platforms. ###