Cray/Media:     Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538
Cray/Financial: Brad Allen, 612/683-7395
NASA/Goddard:   Jarrett Cohen, 301/286-2744


NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER TRIPLES ITS
SUPERCOMPUTING POWER WITH CLUSTER OF CRAY
SUPERCOMPUTERS

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 4, 1995 -- Cray Research, Inc. announced
today at the Supercomputing 95 show held here, that it has
received an order for multiple CRAY J932(tm)
supercomputers from the NASA Center for Computational
Sciences.  The systems were selected by NCCS to move its
production computing from a predominately single processor
environment to a parallel processing center.  The CRAY J932
systems, each scalable up to 32 processors, will be
clustered to provide a tightly integrated distributed
memory environment to tackle even larger computational
workloads.  Cray said the systems range in price from under
$1 to $2.7 million (U.S. list).

The supercomputer cluster, expected to be installed in
1996, will replace a previous-generation Cray
supercomputer and will triple the computing power
available to NCCS's 1,200 earth and space science users in
the next year.  Initially, the CRAY J932 cluster will include
68 processors, 13.6 gigaflops (billion calculations per
second) peak performance, and three times the current
memory capacity -- more than 6 billion bytes.  The systems
will be expanded by the end of 1996 to 96 processors and 12
billion bytes of memory.  This is a total of 19.2 gigaflops
peak performance, three times NCCS's current CRAY C90(tm)
system.

The selection of the CRAY J932 cluster followed the
recommendation of an independent visiting committee to
aggressively pursue scalable parallel processing.  "We are
taking this innovative step to remain at the forefront of
supercomputing," said Dr. Milton Halem, chief of Goddard
Space Flight Center's Space Data and Computing.  "NCCS
scientists proved that scalable computing based on the
cluster of CRAY J932's will enable our users to tackle
current challenges and develop numerical models for
hundreds of processors in the future."

NCCS carried out extensive performance and throughput
tests of 16 critical science applications on the CRAY J932
system.  These included global climate models, data
assimilation systems and ocean circulation models from the
main laboratories in Goddard's Earth Sciences Directorate. 
Using automatic parallelization tools built into Cray's
UNICOS operating system (based on UNIX System V), users
were able to harness multiple processors to achieve
scalable performance.

"We are pleased to provide this clustered supercomputer
solution to the NASA Center for Computational Sciences and
to see this advanced center adopt the new parallel
processing paradigm for their day-to-day mission," said J.
Phillip Samper, chairman and chief executive officer of Cray
Research.

The NASA Center for Computational Sciences provides high
performance computing, mass storage, networking and
visualization resources to the NASA community of earth and
space scientists to meet research and program
commitments.  According to Nancy Palm, head of the Mass
Storage and Scientific Computing Branch, the center's data
storage capability includes one of the world's most active
UniTree mass storage systems with a capacity of over 30
trillion bytes of data.  NCCS is located at Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Cray Research provides the leading high-performance
computing tools and services to help solve customers' most
challenging problems.

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