Cray/Media: Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538

ORYX SELECTS MINNESOTA SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER,
INC. FOR ADVANCED SEISMIC COMPUTING RESOURCES

Eagan, Minn., April 4, 1996 -- Minnesota Supercomputer Center,
Inc. (MSCI), a subsidiary of Cray Research, announced today
that it has signed an agreement with Dallas-based ORYX Energy
Company to provide this company with advanced seismic
processing computing resources.  ORYX plans to significantly
improve the results of its oil exploration efforts by combining
the use of its proprietary 3D seismic technology with MSCI's
CRAY T3D system, a highly scalable parallel supercomputer. 
Terms were not disclosed.

"This is another very important customer for MSCI in the
seismic processing community," said John Sell, president of
MSCI.  "ORYX is an experienced user of remote seismic
computing capability, and their selection of MSCI is evidence
of our solid reputation as a shared supercomputing service
provider to the petroleum industry." 

To more accurately determine the complex geologic structure
of ORYX's offshore exploration plays in the Gulf of New Mexico,
ORYX's seismic processing experts in Dallas will leverage the
power and fast turnaround of MSCI's petroleum computing
services with a new algorithm developed in conjunction with
the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and the
University of Texas at Dallas.

"This algorithm is very computationally demanding and
produces significantly improved results for our seismic
exploration efforts. Because the advanced algorithm requires
highly scalable parallel processing and an extremely capable
disk and tape infrastructure, it would be impractical for ORYX
to run the software without the shared resources of MSCI,"
said Robert Fleming, Team Leader, Application Development
and Exploitation, for ORYX.

The growth of advanced, 3D seismic imaging techniques in the
petroleum industry has created a whole class of
computationally intense problems which have grown far beyond
routine workloads and has caused sporadic seismic processing
"spikes."  Access to high performance shared supercomputing
services offers a proven and practical solution to quickly and
affordably address these extremely large, complex, and
sporadic workloads.  As a result, petroleum companies such as
ORYX now have an attractive alternative to maintaining the
internal computing capacity needed to handle the fluctuations
in their seismic computing loads. 

MSCI, acquired by Cray Research in 1994, has been a leading
provider of production-quality shared supercomputer services
to industrial customers for more than a decade. The addition of
the 76-gigaflop CRAY T3D system in July 1995, combined with
MSCI's experience with seismic customers for over eight
years, has established MSCI as the most powerful commercial
supercomputing center providing service to the petroleum
industry.

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

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