As issued by the United States Department of Commerce, Friday, August 6, 1993. NOAA AWARDS CONTRACT FOR SUPERCOMPUTER The Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded a five-year, $46 million contract to Cray Research, Inc. of Eagan, Minn., to lease a Cray Research 16 processor C90 Supercomputer, the department announced today. The contract completes a competitive procurement conducted on a full and open basis that allowed all domestic and foreign companies to participate. The contract includes support services. The National Weather Service's National Meteorological Center (NMC) will use the powerful Cray C90 supercomputer to process data from around the globe into graphical and alphanumerical outputs from atmospheric models. The supercomputer is one of the world's fastest computing systems. Operating in excess of 15 GigaFlops (15 billion operations per second), the Cray will take four hours to run an extremely complex model the NMC uses to assemble its daily mid-range forecasts. "Cray's C90 will deliver a five-fold increase over our present computing speed," said Elbert W. Friday Jr., NOAA's assistant administrator for weather services. "It will allow us to do more science, with more data, to improve the weather products distributed by our National Meteorological Center." Several computer models have been developed by the NMC to produce daily weather analyses and long range guidance for weather service field offices and a host of private sector weather data users. A wide range of weather data needs, including domestic and international aviation information, precipitation forecasts for agriculture, and maritime forecasts, will be met by the new computer. The Cray computer will enable the National Weather Service to develop improved models for more specific and accurate forecasts with higher degrees of probability. The National Weather Service will begin installing the Cray C90 at its NMC facilities in Suitland, Md. early in 1994. ###