From: "Ingrid Boersma" Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 10:13:30 -0600 To: all-cri@timbuk.cray.com Subject: Stanford U Orders First Cray Mime-Version: 1.0 Cray/Media: Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538 Cray/Financial: Brad Allen, 612/683-7359 STANFORD UNIVERSITY ORDERS ITS FIRST CRAY RESEARCH SUPERCOMPUTER EAGAN, Minn. -- Dec. 1, 1994 -- The Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory in the Department of Civil Engineering at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., has ordered a CRAY J916 supercomputer, Cray Research announced today. This is the first order for a Cray system from Stanford University, Cray officials said. Scheduled for installation in the second quarter of next year, the CRAY J916 supercomputer will be used by faculty and graduate students to research the transport and transformations of air and water pollution. Using the new supercomputer, Stanford researchers will study and simulate atmospheric problems, such as urban, regional and global air pollution; stratospheric ozone depletion; climate change; and cloud acidification. They will also simulate flows in surface waters, transport of contaminants, air-sea exchanges and phytoplankton dynamics in estuaries and shelf seas. The researchers' computer modeling is expected to yield valuable insight into the movement, fate and evolution of pollutants in regions of the environment where physical measurements are difficult. The supercomputer modeling is also expected to prove useful to policy makers charged with regulating air pollutant precursor emissions and with managing large-scale water resource projects, such as the California Water Project. The CRAY J916 will enable Stanford researchers to build on work conducted previously using CRAY C90 series systems. "Many codes we are using have been optimized for Cray Research computers," said Dr. Mark Jacobson, assistant professor. "One such code is a sparse-matrix, vectorized Gear- type ordinary differential equation solver (SMVGEAR)." This code, Jacobson said, runs well on the CRAY C90 and efficiently on the smaller CRAY J916 without modification. In addition, computational fluid dynamics codes, developed using Cray Research parallel vector supercomputers, will be used intensively on the J916 for many studies. "The CRAY J916 was developed specifically for compute- intensive applications such as the environmental modeling being done by Stanford's Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory," said John Carlson, Cray Research chairman and chief executive officer. "This technology opens the door to high performance computing for more organizations, and we are especially delighted to add Stanford to the growing number of universities using our compact supercomputers." Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. ###