CS6400 SPECrate Performance Media: Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538 Financial: Bill Gacki, 612/683-7372 CRAY RESEARCH SUPERSERVERS ANNOUNCES FASTEST- EVER SPECrate92 PERFORMANCE CS6400 Achieves 90 Percent Faster Integer, 35 Percent Faster Floating-Point Performance Than Previous Leading Performers BEAVERTON, Ore., Feb. 17, 1994 -- The new CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 system has achieved the fastest-ever performance on the SPECrate92 standard benchmarks, Cray Research Superservers (CRS) announced today. Specifically, on the SPECrate_int92 benchmark, a 32-processor CS6400 system performed 90 percent faster than the previous highest-recorded figure, and on the SPECrate_fp92 benchmark the system performed 35 percent faster, demonstrating near-linear scalability as more processors were added to the system, according to Martin Buchanan, general manager of CRS. "We are extremely pleased with these excellent performance numbers," said Buchanan. "When we announced the CS6400 system last October we said it would be the fastest and most expandable SPARC/Solaris-compliant computer available. With these SPECrate numbers, we now lead the industry even outside the SPARC and Solaris world." Buchanan said that the CS6400 system is available with 4 to 64 SuperSPARC processors at prices starting under $400,000 (U.S.). Shipments of systems with up to 32-processors began this month, he said. Shipments of 64-processor systems are scheduled for later this year. SPECrate tests on 48- and 64- processor system will be conducted later in the year, Buchanan noted. On the important SPECrate_int92 benchmark, which measures a system's integer computing performance, a 24-processor CS6400 system achieved a rate of 41,967 and a 32-processor system had a rate of 54,186. These figures result in respective scalability ratios of 20.5:1 and 26.5:1, Buchanan said. Similar outstanding performance was recorded on the SPECrate_fp92 benchmark, which measures a system's floating-point computing performance, Buchanan said. The 24-processor rate was 55,734 and a 32-processor system achieved a rate of 72,177. "This is a scalability of 21.9:1 for our 24-processor system and 28.3:1 for our 32-processor model," he said. "This ratio is an important measure of how efficiently the performance of the CS6400 system scales as processors are added. Our scalability ratio is also the industry's highest on these benchmarks." Compilers used for the SPECrate92 benchmarks were from Apogee Software with Kuck and Associates parallelizing pre- processor, and from SunPro, Buchanan noted. He said the SPECrate benchmarks measure system speed not just processor speed. "The scalability ratio is therefore very significant because it shows the true efficiency of the system's hardware and software and reveals the time lost to overhead' computing," Buchanan said. "In the case of our 32-processor floating-point benchmark, no more than four processors are needed for overhead computing activity. All the remaining processors are focused on direct computation related to the problem," he said. "The previous highest 32-processor SPEC_fp92 leader had a scalability ratio on this benchmark of only of 23:1, meaning more than eight processors were being lost to overhead computing." CRS also announced today leading performance on preliminary LINPACK benchmarks, which are independently maintained by Dr. Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. On the LINPACK-1000, a 24-processor CS6400 system produced 613 megaflops (or Mflops, million floating-point operations per second), while a 32-processor model achieved 689 Mflops. The LINPACK N performance on a 32-processor CS6400 system was 1266 MFlops on a 5,000 by 5,000 matrix. A "half-speed" (634 Mflops) matrix was 950 by 950, which also showed excellent scalability and system efficiency, according to Buchanan. All results were with 64-bit precision floating- point arithmetic. The LINPACK benchmark measures system performance in solving a set of linear equations, calculations of the type used in mathematical modeling. The CS6400 system is an enterprise data server aimed at the commercial and technical markets. It can also be used as a compute server for mathematical modeling of parallel processing applications such as petroleum exploration, time-series analysis, option evaluation, financial derivative analysis, and general decision support applications, Buchanan said. "We see a number of emerging commercial applications that require a combination of integer, floating point, and I/O performance, as well as high availability features," he said. "Because of Cray Research's experience in high performance technologies and parallel processing, the CS6400 will be well suited to address these applications as well." Later this year, CRS plans to release figures for additional benchmarks such as TPC, LADDIS, and AIM Suite III, Buchanan noted. The CS6400 is a symmetric multi-processing system which is completely SPARC/Solaris compliant. Systems are available with up to 64 processors, up to 16 gigabytes of memory, more than 2 terabytes of online storage, and up to 64 I/O channels. The new system is the first UNIX Superserver system to include the reliability, availability and serviceability features needed for today's commercial production environment. CRS, based here, is a subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR). Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest- quality computational tools for solving the world's most challenging scientific and industrial problems. ### Editor's Note: The chart below gives SPECrate performance information for CS6400 system. Benchmark # of Processors Rating Scalability SPECrate_int92 24 41,967 20.5:1 32 54,186 26.5:1 SPECrate_fp92 24 55,734 21.9:1 32 72,177 28.3:1 Trademarks -- Of special note, Superserver is a registered trademark and CS6400 is a trademark of Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (CRS) The following companies own their respective trademarks as well: Cray Research, Inc. - CRAY; Sun Microsystems, Inc - Solaris; SPARC International Inc. - SPARC, SuperSPARC; Xerox Corp. - Ethernet; SunPro is a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All SPARC trademarks are trademarks of SPARC International Inc. Products bearing the SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. #####