Cray/Media: Gerri Dyrek, 612/683-3635 American Petroleum Institute: Chris Kelley, 202/682-8181 CRAY SUBSIDIARY, MSCI, PLAYS KEY ROLE IN LIVE, FIRST-TIME PETROLEUM INDUSTRY TECHNOLOGY DEMONSTRATION "Real-time" Seismic Exploration is Part of the Largest, Most Comprehensive Demonstration of a National Information Infrastructure Washington, D.C., Feb. 26, 1996 --Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc. (MSCI), a subsidiary of Cray Research, announced that it is playing a critical role in a pioneering, live petroleum industry technology demonstration held today at the National Press Club. The demonstration, sponsored by ATM Research and Industrial Enterprise Study (ARIES), the American Petroleum Institute, NASA, the Department of Energy and several telecommunications firms marks the first time a moving oil exploration ship will transmit seismic field data from a location at sea via a high-powered satellite to an on-shore computer center for analysis_all in real-time. The demonstration utilizes a variety of leading-edge technologies_including a Cray(R) supercomputer_to create the largest, most comprehensive National Information Infrastructure (NII) prototype capability. Cray said the success of this demonstration combined with new technologies for seismic data compression could provide petroleum companies with the option of using remote high-end supercomputing power instead of deploying less powerful computers on board seismic exploration ships. This emerging technology model is becoming a viable alternative for very rapid processing results. Cray is a leader in providing high-performance parallel systems, as well as shared supercomputing services through MSCI, to the worldwide petroleum industry. The company's involvement in the project is part of Cray's continuous effort to promote the productive use of emerging technologies in order to make oil exploration more efficient and cost- effective for its customers. Cray also said the demonstration involves advanced satellite technology not yet generally available to the private sector but with the potential to save oil companies substantial time and money. ARIES project officials said that it could save months and hundreds of thousands of dollars per seismic survey and also has potential applications in the weather forecasting, medical and communications industries. The demonstration equipment includes one of MSCI's Cray supercomputers as the compute engine for the seismic data processing along with NASA's Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), an ATM network, and other advanced technologies. The raw data generated by the moving ship 120 miles off-shore in the Gulf of Mexico will be beamed via satellite from the ship to the downlink at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and then to MSCI in Minneapolis via ATM lines. Here the data will be processed using advanced seismic imaging software from Schlumberger/Geco-Prakla. Cray said processing time is expected to take only a few minutes and the resulting data will be transferred via fast ATM network to seven other interactive sites around the United States including research labs, four oil companies and a medical center. At these sites, the data will be visualized into advanced animation using 3-D imaging techniques. The live seismic exploration demonstration can be viewed via video-conferencing technology at the Washington, D.C. event. Until the advent of the technologies proposed by ARIES, petroleum companies did not have a timely means of getting data from moving oil exploration ships to remote supercomputer sites for real-time seismic exploration. Cray petroleum industry experts said the current industry-standard method for seismic data transmission is to conduct limited initial processing on-board and then transfer the data to high- density tapes. The tapes are then sent to a central supercomputing center for complex processing and visual output of the field survey, which shows the earth's subsurface for oil location and extraction. Cray's parallel supercomputers are widely used in the petroleum industry for their high-performance processing and data management capabilities, especially for today's complex 3-D pre-stack depth migration problems. Cray said many of its petroleum customers process routine seismic analyses that often involve many days of computation time and up to four or more terabytes of data. 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 experience with seismic customers for over 8 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. ### Please see the separate press release issued today by the American Petroleum Institute for additional details.