Cray/Media: Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538 Cray/Financial: Bill Gacki, 612/683-7372 CRAY RESEARCH AND UK-BASED MCDONNELL INFORMATION SYSTEMS SIGN DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT FOR CRAY SUPERSERVER SYSTEM EAGAN, Minn., July 18, 1994 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR) announced today a distribution agreement under which McDonnell Information Systems (MDIS), a UK-based systems integrator, will become a non-exclusive worldwide distributor (excluding Japan) of the CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) systems, Cray's high-end SPARC/Solaris-compliant system. MDIS announced today that it has signed a marketing agreement with Sun Microsystems, Inc. to resell and integrate Sun's product line. Under these agreements, MDIS will market, together with the complete portfolio of MDIS application software, the full range of Sun products and CS6400 systems, which together make up the most scalable, binary compatible line of systems in the industry today, according to Martin Buchanan, vice president of operations for Cray Research Superservers (CRS), the Cray subsidiary that developed, manufactures and markets the CS6400 systems. "We are pleased that MDIS has elected to sell the full range of SPARC/Solaris systems. MDIS' expertise in providing open systems solutions for commercial markets provides a valuable addition to our global distribution and systems integration channels," Buchanan said. Doug Thomson, sales and marketing director for MDIS, said, "our customers told us they wanted more choice, more power and more performance from the hardware components of our IT (information technology) solutions. We listened, studied the market and have taken what we believe to be the right actions." He said these new agreements will allow MDIS, as a systems integrator, to offer its solutions on the widest, most powerful range of computer hardware in the business. This agreement with MDIS is part of the global sales and marketing plan for Cray Research's new line of highly scalable SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems, which are designed for commercial applications. Today's agreement follows previously announced plans to market and sell the CS6400 system through distribution channels that include: the Cray Research salesforce; a global network of systems integrators and value-added resellers (VARs); and joint initiatives with Sun Microsystems. MDIS intends to provide a full range of maintenance and repair services for the CS6400 systems, continuing its policy of single-source contracts that include a unique one-hour engineering response to major hardware problems. MDIS is an independent British information systems company that produces and distributes open systems software and hardware products and provides a variety of application packages, facilities management, disaster recovery, and a full range of supporting services. The company plans to target the CS6400 system to the banking and health care industries as well as throughout the public sector, commerce and industry. Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and service to help solve customers' most challenging problems. Data warehousing, decision support, transaction processing and multimedia applications which challenge current technologies are the targets for Cray Research's new line of highly scalable CS6400 systems. ###