Cray/Media:       Mardi Larson, 612-683-3538
Cray/Financial:   Brad Allen, 612-683-7395

NCSA INSTALLS CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 SYSTEM

EAGAN, Minn., April 26, 1995 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE: CYR)
today announced that it has installed a CRAY SUPERSERVER
6400 (CS6400) system under an evaluation agreement at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The CS6400 data
server is the newest enhancement to NCSA's computational
resources for the national research community.

According to NCSA Director Larry Smarr, researchers at NCSA
are responding to a national need among U.S. businesses for
new types of high-performance computing applications.  "We
see NCSA as a vital commercial application testbed for U.S.
businesses to use in prototyping solutions that can be
transferred to their own computing environments," Smarr said. 
"The CS6400 will enable NCSA to continue to provide a
leadership role in scalable client-server solutions for business
applications.  We hope to have further discussions with Cray
Research regarding the possibility of team efforts with NCSA
in this area."

"The CS6400 has already captured commercial customers in the
insurance, travel and tourism, financial services, general
manufacturing, and managed healthcare industries and will be
applied to very large databases in the multiple terabytes
range," according to Robert H. Ewald, Cray Research president
and chief operating officer.  "NCSA has always been committed
to enhancing American competitiveness in science,
engineering, education and business.  We are pleased to bring
our business computing expertise to NCSA and look forward to
working with NCSA on this critically important initiative."  

NCSA is building a network of business partners, hardware and
software vendors, and academic researchers to make scalable
applications available that tap the powerful resources of
supercomputers and data servers like the CS6400 system. 
NCSA will use the CS6400 data server for a variety of
applications including geographical information systems (GIS),
intelligent algorithms, and parallel structured queries on large
databases.

GIS provides environmental and demographic data for use in
business, education and commerce.  A common obstacle for GIS
client-server systems is the inability to manage large volumes
of data. "The CS6400 is ideal for this type of application
because it can easily handle high data transfer rates and
processing while managing heavy storage burdens," Smarr
added.

In addition, the CS6400 will be used to augment traditional
methods of data analysis with techniques developed in the
artificial intelligence community, including machine learning,
connectionist, and genetic algorithms. "These techniques are
referred to as intelligent algorithms," Smarr said.  "Our goal is
to discover, within very large quantities of data, patterns that
are of interest to the user."  Although the goal of fully
automating the process of knowledge discovery has yet to be
realized, numerous algorithms have been developed with which
exploratory work can begin using real-world data sets on
today's high-performance computer architectures.  NCSA
believes there are major opportunities to work with companies
who wish to explore these techniques on their own data. 

NCSA will be exploring leading edge parallel database products
such as those provided by Oracle, Informix, and Sybase to the
multi-gigabyte databases being generated by NCSA's industrial
partners.  The parallel architecture of the CS6400 data server
along with parallel database technology, will enable decision
support systems and other query-intensive applications to help
businesses find new competitive advantages within their
databases.

The CS6400 system, beginning at under $400,000 (U.S. list
price), is offered with up to 64 SuperSPARC Plus
microprocessors, up to 16 gigabytes of central memory and
more than five terabytes of on-line storage.  The system runs
the Solaris operating environment, which, among other
enhancements, has been parallelized for up to 64 processors. 
The CS6400 system began shipping in February 1994.  

NCSA, a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
is dedicated to advancing leading-edge technologies in
information and high-performance computing and
communications in academia and industry.  The center receives
major funding to support its research from the National
Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency,
NASA, corporate partners, the State of Illinois, and the
University of Illinois.

Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and
services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. 
Data warehousing, decision support, transaction processing and
multimedia applications which challenge current technologies
are the targets for Cray Research's new line of highly scalable
CS6400 systems.

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