Mardi Schmieder, 612/683-3538

Laura Merriam, 612/683-7395





CRAY RESEARCH RECEIVES FIRST ASIA PACIFIC ORDER 

FOR LARGEST SUPERCOMPUTER



EAGAN, Minn., June 28, 1993 -- The Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST),

Deajon, Korea, has ordered a CRAY C916 system, the company announced today.  This marks the

first Asia Pacific order for  Cray Research's top-of-the-line supercomputer and also the

company's first head-to-head competition with the new Fujitsu VPP 500 system. 



KIST's new CRAY C916 system is scheduled for installation in fourth quarter of this year at the

customer's Systems Engineering Research Institute (SERI).  The new supercomputer, with 16

processors and 512 million words of central memory, will be used primarily by Korean

universities and industrial research organizations for structural and mechanical engineering,

weather forecasting and environmental research, chemistry and biological applications,

computational fluid dynamics, graphics and image processing research, and petroleum

exploration. 



The CRAY C916 system, available with eight to 16 processors, has a peak performance of 16

billion floating point operations per second (gigaflops) and a list price in the U.S. of $19

million to $40.5 million.   Bob Ewald, executive vice president of Cray Research and general

manager of the company's supercomputer operations, noted that this supercomputer has 

sustained from six to over 10 gigaflops on more than a dozen key commercial application

software codes used in the automotive, aerospace, chemical, and petroleum industries.  



"It's easy to talk about system performance figures before a system is subjected to real

competition," said Ewald.  "This win shows that the CRAY C916 is today's most powerful

supercomputer for real-world problems."



"We are the only public supercomputer center in Korea and our nearly 300 users have been

satisfied with the existing Cray Research system since it was installed in 1988," said Dr. Moon-

Hyun Kim, president of SERI.  "To keep such a good reputation, the stability and reliability, as

well as performance of the follow-on system were the key factors for our decisions.  In this

regard, the CRAY C916 system was matchless."



This will be the first CRAY C916 system to be installed in Korea.  Cray Research has received

nineteen orders for the CRAY C916 system since the company announced the new product in

November 1991.   Orders for the system have come from classified government customers,

supercomputing centers, weather forecasting organizations, environmental research facilities,

Department of Energy laboratories, NASA facilities, and Ford Motor Company. 



Including its entry-level supercomputer systems, Cray Research has more than 450 systems

installed worldwide.  More than 80 systems are dedicated to university research around the

world.



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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