Cray/Media: Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538 Cray/Financial: Bill Gacki, 612/683-7372 NEW CRAY RESEARCH COMPACT SUPERCOMPUTER SERIES DELIVERS UP TO 12-FOLD PRICE-PERFORMANCE INCREASE Beginning at $225,000, CMOS-based Supercomputer Leverages Cray's Long History In 64-bit-UNIX Client/Server EAGAN, Minn., Sept. 26, 1994 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR) today announced the CRAY J916 system, the first in a new series of low-cost, compact supercomputers designed to operate as powerful simulation servers for large problems that challenge or exhaust the capabilities of workstations. The company said the new series is fully compatible with Cray Research's entire line of parallel/vector supercomputers and is expected to provide up to 12 times the price-performance of Cray Research's successful CRAY EL90 compact systems. Priced from $225,000 in the U.S. and slated for volume shipments in the first quarter of 1995, the new CRAY J916 supercomputers are scalable, UNIX-based servers with four to 16 processors, according to John Carlson, Cray Research chairman and chief executive officer. Cray Research plans to expand the new product line next year, he said. The company has received 37 advance orders for the new system from industrial, government and university organizations throughout the world, said Carlson. The CRAY J916 supercomputer is the third generation of Cray Research systems priced beginning well under $1 million. According to Carlson the company has recorded more than 250 orders for these low-cost systems since entering this market in late 1991. Of these orders, over 140 are from new-to-Cray customers in a number of new industries for the company such as banking and finance, construction, as well as the automotive manufacturers' supplier market, he said. The CRAY J916 supercomputer has a peak system speed of 3.2 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) in 64-bit mode, compared with a maximum of eight processors and a peak system speed of one gigaflops for the previous CRAY EL90 series. And, when multiple systems are clustered, the total peak capabilities can reach as high as 100 gigaflops, Carlson said. On the average, the CRAY J916 supercomputer delivers from 60 to 70 percent of the system's peak capability on a wide range of applications, he noted. "We've known for a long time that the delivered system performance on a wide range of applications is a function of a system's memory bandwidth and its balanced design, rather than its peak processing speed," said Carlson. "With a memory bandwidth of 25.6 gigabytes (billion bytes) per second, the CRAY J916 system provides up to 20 times the memory bandwidth of systems in its class. Other competing systems' overall ability to deliver sustained performance on real work is hindered by their unbalanced design and lack of adequate memory bandwidth." Target Markets "The CRAY J916 supercomputers are developed for compute- intensive design, engineering and technical analysis problems," Carlson said. "The systems are ideal as simulation servers for small-to-medium sized organizations operating in a variety of industries, as well as departments of large organizations that may already utilize Cray Research supercomputers." "The effective price-performance of the CRAY J916 supercomputer on a broad range of important engineering and technical application packages will help us expand our presence in new industries, as well as industries in which we currently operate," he said. For example, all the world's major auto-makers use Cray Research supercomputers to help them design new vehicles and reduce time-to-market, Carlson said. The new CRAY J916 product will be used by companies like these, and will be especially attractive to automotive suppliers and consultants that work with these large manufacturers, he said. Compact Cray Research supercomputers are already being used in this way throughout the world and many of the advance CRAY J916 orders are from suppliers and consultants, Carlson noted. "Our affordable CRAY EL90 series systems have brought Cray Research into new geographies and new markets. We expect the CRAY J916 systems to appeal to an even broader market, particularly the industrial marketplace such as in the automotive, aerospace, chemical, pharmaceutical and general manufacturing industries where our previous compact systems have been successful." Proven Client/Server Technology According to Robert Ewald, Cray Research chief operating officer, supercomputer operations, the CRAY J916 supercomputer is a low-cost, scaled-down version of Cray Research's proven technology. Because the CRAY J916 system is binary compatible with larger Cray Research supercomputers, the thousands of application packages that operate on Cray Research systems at customer sites run without modification on the CRAY J916 systems. All of the applications available for Cray Research supercomputers from independent software vendors run unchanged on the CRAY J916 system as well, he said. For the past 10 years, Cray Research has provided the marketplace with high-performance, UNIX-based, multi-user systems that operate in a client/server environment. By nature of their uses, these high-performance systems are integrated with workstations and other devices on a network, Ewald said, noting that all Cray Research system users access these powerful systems from workstations and other desktop devices. In fact, nearly one-third of Cray Research system users get to the company's supercomputers from personal computers and Macintoshes, he said. "We call it open supercomputing' and what it essentially means is that we transparently connect to a wide variety of desktop devices," Ewald said. "It's as if the power of the Cray is on the desktop." "Cray remains the dominant player in an industry that it helped create," said Chris Willard, industry expert with International Data Corporation in Mountain View, Calif. "IDC believes a key differentiator for Cray continues to be its ability to effectively integrate its products into a wide range of client/server networks and multi-vendor user environments." Ewald said the CRAY J916 supercomputers: o Provide true supercomputer performance starting at under $1 million -- more than a gigaflops sustained performance on a broad range of engineering and technical applications. o Are compatible with workstations. As a central simulation server, the CRAY J916 supercomputer is an open system and easily connects to workstation devices made by a variety of suppliers. It supports the most popular workstation data formats with transparent, automatic data conversion. o Are based on Cray Research supercomputer technology to deliver total system performance. Some competing supercomputer offerings based on workstation technology have limited memory size, memory bandwidth, and rely on the low speeds of ethernet as their "system" interconnect. These competing systems offer limited scalability and are confined to low-end configurations when total system performance is considered. The CRAY J916 has up to 4 gigabytes of central memory and a memory bandwidth of up to 25.6 gigabytes per second, far exceeding competing products. o Use advanced CMOS chips with 150,000 to 800,000 gates per chip in an innovative design that reduces the Cray Research central processing unit (CPU) -- previously consisting of hundreds of chips and multiple multi- layered printed circuit boards -- to two powerful processor chips and a handful of supporting chips. o Can be clustered, providing virtually unlimited, versatile capacity upgrades. Customers can easily add more processors to one CRAY J916 system and can link multiple systems for a tightly integrated distributed memory environment to tackle even larger workloads. Even without clustering, a single CRAY J916 system's large, real central memory can handle heavy workloads that would exhaust the cache memory and memory bandwidths of uniprocessor workstations. Tested by Experts In a July 1994 product review, Advanced Systems magazine's test lab gave the current CRAY EL94 system a nine-out-of-10 overall rating, earning it the publication's "Best Product" award. The reviewers said, "If your applications are numerically intensive with large datasets that easily break caches on more conventional machines, the (Cray compact supercomputer) may be your best bet. We found using Cray's parallelizing and vectorizing directives is not difficult and its suite of software tools makes tackling large codes easier...The kinds of problems that rely on these features are most often found in engineering and scientific disciplines, rather than in commercial applications." Ewald said the CRAY J916 systems run the same UNICOS operating system and the same programming environments (C, C++, Fortran, Fortran 90) as large Cray Research supercomputers, as well as the CRAY EL90 system tested by the publication. For commercial applications, he said, the company offers a SPARC/Solaris-compliant system that scales up to 64 SuperSPARC Plus microprocessors and begins at under $400,000. The CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) system is primarily designed for applications such as data warehousing, decision support services (DSS), online transaction processing (OLTP), and multimedia. Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. ###