Cray/Media:     Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538
Cray/Financial: Bill Gacki, 612/683-7372
Sun Media:      Cindee Mock, 415/336-3563

CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 AND ORACLE7 BREAK TPC-B
DATABASE PERFORMANCE BARRIER AND SETS
PRICE/PERFORMANCE RECORD

System Achieves 2,025 Transactions Per Second, $1,110 Per
Transaction On Audited TPC-B Benchmark

Beaverton, Ore., June 9, 1994 -- Cray Research Superservers
(CRS), a subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR) based
here, today announced that its CRAY SUPERSERVER(tm) 6400
(CS6400) system, which combines a range of reliability
features with scalable symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), has
achieved yet another industry leading performance and
price/performance record. 

A 28-processor configuration performed 2,025.20 transactions
per second (tpsB) at $1,110.14 per tpsB on the Transaction
Processing Performance Council TPC-B benchmark(tm) using
the Oracle7(tm) Server.  The performance was audited
independently and a full disclosure report was submitted to
the Council for approval. 

This is the highest recorded performance on the TPC-B
benchmark among all vendors and architectures in the industry
and the first time that the 2,000 tpsB performance barrier has
been broken.  The CS6400 system is not only the fastest
system but at $1,110 per tpsB, its price/performance ranks
first among the top ten performance leaders on the TPC-B
benchmark, CRS officials said.

This announcement follows an earlier announcement where a
32-processor CS6400 system broke industry records on the
SPECrate_int92 and SPECrate_fp92 benchmarks by 90% and
30% respectively.

"We believe this excellent performance and price/performance
reaffirm that the CS6400 is the ideal solution for database
applications, especially as the commercial world continues to
move to open systems and the client/server architecture," said
Les Davis, chief operating officer of Cray Research. "The
system's extensive RAS (Reliability, Availability and
Serviceability) capabilities, the largest base of UNIX
applications software, and Cray's unmatched reputation for
partnering with customers to solve their problems, make the
CS6400 a superior solution for addressing today's challenging
OLTP, decision support and data warehousing applications."

The CS6400 system brings together core technologies from
two computer industry leaders, Cray Research and Sun
Microsystems, Inc.  The system is the highest performing
SPARC/Solaris-compliant system with added Cray features for
high memory and interconnect bandwidth, multi-terabyte on-
line storage, industry-leading scalability, and RAS features
not found today in other UNIX server systems.  The new system
is the direct result of a continuous technology agreement
between Cray Research and Sun.

"Once again the CRAY SUPERSERVER system has demonstrated
the scalability of SPARC and Solaris," said Scott McNealy,
chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc.  "The
Sun/Cray product line provides the widest range of scalable,
binary-compatible solutions on the market today: from $3,000
entry-level systems to the 64 processor Cray systems.  Now
organizations of any size can rely on the proven capabilities,
expandability, and excellent price/performance of SPARC and
Solaris."

"Binary compatibility and scalability of SPARC and Solaris
allow us to run the identical copy of Oracle7 across Sun and
Cray" according to Jerry Baker, senior vice president of Oracle. 
"Our alliance with Cray is an important component of Oracle's
commitment to providing a robust, highly scalable and
economical mainframe alternative solution.  Cray's
announcement of the fastest ever TPC-B performance
demonstrates the company's commitment to bringing its
technology to the commercial database world.  

"The combination of Oracle and Cray provides the ultimate
solution for high-end mission critical database applications.
This benchmark is our first run on a 28 CPU SPARC/Solaris
system and is a superb testimonial to the superior scalability
of Cray and the standard Oracle7 Server."

TPC-B is a standard benchmark that provides an indication of
the on-line transaction processing capability of computer
systems.  The benchmark originated in the banking industry and
simulates on-line banking transactions with thousands of
users updating a central database.  It is a good measure of the
overall throughput capability and scalability of a system for
database-oriented applications, according to Jeff Pancottine,
CRS director of marketing.

"We are very pleased with our industry leading performance
and price/performance on this important benchmark," said
Pancottine.  "It proves that the CS6400 is an excellent choice
in the on-line transaction processing environment, and that we
are building the right products, partnerships and special
engineering alliances with vendors such as Oracle and Sun for
the commercial data processing marketplace.  CRS will
continue to demonstrate the CS6400's advantages in the
commercial market through on-going benchmarking, key
strategic relationships and strong distribution channels."

The CS6400 system is a total solution for commercial and
technical applications by providing high performance,
excellent price/performance, extensive RAS capabilities and
the industry's largest base of third party solutions.  These
include relational data base management systems (RDBMS),
system and network management, connectivity to mainframe
systems, CASE tools, transaction processing monitors, tape
volume management, network batch management, and a wide
range of other applications. 

With 4 to 64 processors, 16 gigabytes of central memory,
multiple terabytes of disk storage, and a peak system
bandwidth of 1.76 gigabytes per second, the CS6400 system is
the industry's most scalable SMP system.  No other vendor in
the world offers an SMP system that scales to this level; CRS
will soon announce availability and standard benchmark
performance for the 64-processor configurations. The CS6400
system has a starting price of under $400,000 (US).

The CS6400 system has been installed at sites in the US,
Europe and Japan for a variety of production and mission-
critical database applications in the telecommunications,
petroleum and utilities industries, as well as for managing the
UK's census data.

Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and
services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. 
Data warehouse, decision support, transaction processing and
multimedia applications which challenge current technologies
are the target for Cray Research's new line of highly-scalable
SMP platforms.

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