Media:	Mardi Schmieder 612-683-3538

Financial:Laura Merriam 612-683-7195



CRAY RESEARCH ANNOUNCES COMPATIBLE DESKSIDE SYSTEM FOR APPLICATIONS

DEVELOPMENT  



EAGAN, Minn., July 20 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR) today announced the CRAY EL92

deskside computer system, the company's smallest, lowest-priced system to date.  The new

product, scheduled for fourth-quarter availability, will be sold primarily as an applications

development platform for the company's full line of CRAY C90 parallel vector supercomputer

systems, as well as for the CRAY T3D, Cray Research's first massively parallel processing

(MPP) system due out later this year.  



"With a U.S. starting price of $125,000 and a footprint of about four square feet, the CRAY

EL92 is designed to extend Cray Research compatibility to office environments at attractive

prices," said Derek Robb, Cray Research director of sales and marketing support.  The new

system, he said, uses the same technology as the company's CRAY EL98 entry-level

supercomputer series, the company's previously lowest-priced computers that begin at under

$350,000 in the U.S.



By using the CRAY EL92 for applications development, customers can reserve their larger Cray

Research systems for solving complex problems and handling interactive workloads, he said. 

According to Robb, the new system can also be used to offload smaller problems currently

running on the large systems; as a low-cost, high-performance network node for vector and

parallel applications;  to run pilot simulations of large jobs destined for more powerful Cray

Research systems; and as a "network resource broker" using Cray's Network Queuing

Environment (NQE) product.



The CRAY EL92 is available with one or two CPUs, and 256 to 512 megabytes (32 to 64 

megawords) of real main memory, he said.  The air-cooled system operates on standard 50 Hz

and 60 Hz power, and can easily be installed by customers in office environments.  It is offered

with a fast HIPPI interface for network connectivity applications such as Parallel Virtual

Machine (PVM), or to speed transfers of large datasets to CRAY 90 and CRAY T3D systems, Robb

added.  



Robb said the new system runs more than 600 applications currently operating on larger Cray

systems and includes the company's industry-leading UNICOS operating system, which is UNIX-

based and POSIX-compliant.  "The CRAY EL92 system includes the same operating system,

programming environments, compilers and networking capabilities as more powerful Cray

Research Systems."  In addition, he said, the system can also be ordered with the  CRAY T3D

Emulator, a software tool that helps programmers using the CF77 programming environment to

develop and test applications for the CRAY T3D massively parallel system.



The CRAY EL92 can be clustered with each other, or with a CRAY Y-MP, CRAY C90 or CRAY T3D

system, and applied to a single job using PVM software, he said.   The system can operate

compatibly with non-Cray systems in heterogeneous networks because of its adherence to

industry standards in its operating system, programming languages (Fortran 77, C, C++),

networks (HIPPI, FDDI, Ethernet), and distributed computing environments (PVM, RQS/NQS,

NQE), he said.



The new system will be sold by Cray Research, he said.  UL approval is expected prior to

shipment.



Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest-quality computational tools for solving the

world's most challenging scientific and industrial problems. 



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