Cray Research:  Chris Windridge 344-485971 (U.K.)
                Steve Conway 612-683-7133 (U.S. media)
                Bill Gacki 612-683-7372 (U.S. financial)
M.C. Centre:    Prof. Frank Sumner 061-275-6196 (U.K.)

MANCHESTER COMPUTING CENTRE CHOOSES CRAY
SUPERSERVER SYSTEM TO PROVIDE NATIONAL DATASET
(DATABASE) SERVICE TO UK ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

BRACKNELL, England, March 15, 1994 -- The Manchester
Computing Centre, University of Manchester, has selected a 
Cray Research Superserver system as the new computing
platform for the United Kingdom (UK) census data and other
National Dataset (database) Services the Centre provides under
government contract to academic researchers throughout the
UK, officials of Cray Research UK Ltd., Bracknell, announced
today.

A 12-processor CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) system
won the procurement for a high-performance UNIX system to
take over the national datasets workload from the Centre's
mainframe system, according to Cray Research UK managing
director Chris Windridge.  The new system has completed
acceptance tests and is scheduled to go into operation later
this month.  It will support more than 90 higher education
institutions and two thousand academic researchers registered
for the National Dataset Services provided through the Centre,
he said.  

Along with the UK census data, jointly funded by the UK Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Economic and
Social Research Council (ESRC), the Centre provides access to
a range of large, complex datasets that include International
Monetary Fund international financial statistics; digital map
data; scientific and bibliographic data.   The Manchester
Computing Centre is one of several leading United Kingdom
computing facilities designated to provide National Dataset
Services by JISC.   

"The CS6400 system is a national facility, purchased from the
national budget and available to all UK academic researchers,"
said Professor Frank Sumner, the University's director of
computing services.  Funding for the system came from JISC.

Professor Sumner said the CS6400 system won the
procurement by clearly outperforming competing systems on
rigorous benchmark tests.  "Our benchmarks measured
combined workload capacity, computational power and
response time.  With 175 users accessing eight separate one-
gigabyte (billion byte) datasets, the CS6400's response time
was almost instantaneous, a fraction of a second," he said.

"We have always had leading-edge computer architectures,
starting more than 40 years ago with systems developed by a
team at the University of Manchester -- the Mk 1 in the
1950's, followed by the Mercury and the Atlas,"  Professor
Sumner said.

"Our goal was to move to an open software approach with this
procurement," said Keith Cole, the Centre's national datasets
co-ordinator. "UNIX-based operating systems are fast
becoming the standard across the UK academic community.  The
CS6400 system runs a high-performance version of Solaris,
Sun Microsystem's UNIX implementation for which a great deal
of software has been written."

Cole said that the CS6400 system's advantages were the
enhanced standard Solaris (UNIX) in combination with
mainframe performance and reliability.  "This system has
exceptional input-output bandwidth, which is very important
for some data analysis runs.  For example, a hierarchical
database analysis using SPSS and SAS software took minutes
on the CS6400 system, versus more than eight hours on a
personal computer."   

The new system also met another acceptance test requirement --
three weeks of uninterrupted operation, Cole said.  "System
reliability is an extremely important requirement for a
national datasets service."

Cole said users will also benefit from improved user
interfaces and access to UNIX programming tools.  "We will be
able to move to an interactive, menu-driven system where the
user interfaces will be the same ones as on our users' desktop
systems.  This ease-of-use will be helpful for inexperienced or
casual users, while sophisticated users will have a familiar
environment to create their own command files."

A number of leading statistical and relational database
software packages will be immediately available on the
CS6400 system, with more to follow, he said.

According to Windridge, this is the first UK order for the
CS6400 system, introduced in Oct. 1993.   He said Sun
Microsystems Ltd. submitted the CS6400 bid to the Manchester
Computing Centre.   "This is not surprising, since the CS6400
systems are a binary-compatible upward extension of Sun's
product line and were developed by our Cray Research
Superservers subsidiary (CRS), based in Beaverton, Oregon, in
cooperation with Sun Microsystems."   In the near future, he
said, CRS plans to open an additional UK office dedicated to
marketing and supporting its new Superserver systems here. 

"With the introduction of this Cray system, users now have the
widest choice of binary-compatible systems, from the desktop
through to the entreprise-class CS6400 system," said Bill
Passmore, vice president, Northern Europe for Sun
Microsystems. "This clearly demonstrates the unmatched
scalability and robustness of the SPARC architecture and the
Solaris operating environment."

"This competitive win at one of the world's leading computing
facilities is further proof that the new CS6400 products are
the most capable UNIX RISC servers available today," said Cray
Research chairman and CEO John F. Carlson.  "Cray Research
and Cray Research Superservers are fully committed to
working with the Centre to achieve its goals for this system."

In February, CRS announced industry-leading performance by
the CS6400 system on the widely accepted SPECrate_int92
standard benchmark (90 percent higher than the previous
record for any system) and the SPECrate_fp92 benchmark (35
percent higher than the prior record).

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