Cray/Media:       Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538
Cray/Financial:   Brad Allen, 612/683-7395
PSC/Media:        Michael Schneider, 412/268-5869

FIRST CRAY T3E CUSTOMER SYSTEM IS SHIPPED TO PITTSBURGH
SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER

In First Three Weeks Of Operation, Applications Are Running In
Parallel Mode on New Cray System

EAGAN, Minn., April 17, 1996 -- The first CRAY T3E scalable
parallel system has been installed at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center (PSC) and is already running parallel
applications, Cray Research announced today. 

Since installing the early-access system only three weeks ago,
six applications are now running in parallel mode on the new
Cray system, said PSC officials, and a number of additional
applications are targeted for near-term deployment.  PSC
scientific co-director Michael Levine said that all applications
running to date on the new system have produced correct
results and that PSC experts have verified hardware and
software stability with repeated long overnight runs.
 
Applications selected for early migration to the CRAY T3E
system include several developed by PSC staff and users, as
well as frequently used off-the-shelf packages ported and
optimized for scalable parallel computing under PSC's Parallel
Applications Technology Program partnership with Cray. 
Applications already running include major quantum chemistry
and biomedical applications (CHARMM, GAMESS and
AMBER). Others to be added will include software for
crystallographic structure determination, properties of
advanced materials, leading-edge environmental and finite-
element multiphysics codes and Msearch, PSC's parallel genome
sequence database searching and alignment package. 

Cray said volume shipments of the new supercomputer are
slated to begin in third quarter.  PSC's system will be upgraded
over time and ultimately scale to 512 processors.  The center
will continue operating its prior-generation CRAY T3D system
for production problems and will replace it when the CRAY T3E
reaches 512 processors, according to Levine, who made a
presentation at an Executive Cray User Group meeting
today on the status of the CRAY T3E system and PSC's
applications migration progress.

"On behalf of the national scientific community, we at PSC are
looking forward to the substantially increased capability of the
new CRAY T3E," Levine said. "Its faster processing and
communications speeds, coupled with a much larger memory,
will enhance our ability to attack leading-edge problems while
maintaining our multi-year investment in highly optimized
applications programs.  This will keep PSC, the NSF
supercomputer centers program and American researchers in a
world leadership position."

Levine said that over the course of the last three years, PSC
users have run a wide-range of industrial and scientific
problems on the current CRAY T3D supercomputer, consuming
about 4.6 million processing hours. "When we get into full
production with the CRAY T3E," said Levine, "we expect
scientific productivity to improve by a factor of three to four." 

"We are pleased that this early access system is enabling PSC
application experts to make such rapid advances in migrating
their applications to the CRAY T3E environment," said Robert H.
Ewald, Cray Research president and chief operating officer.
"The CRAY T3E preserves the macroarchitecture and
programming environment of the CRAY T3D. This consistency
protects PSC's parallel applications investment and
contributes to this exceptional progress by PSC and Cray
personnel. This early applications progress will enable the
production use of the CRAY T3E at PSC and other customers
later this year." 

Cray said that it had more than $160 million in advance orders
for the CRAY T3E system at year-end 1995.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint effort of
Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh
together with Westinghouse Electric Corp., was established in
1986 by a grant from the National Science Foundation with
support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Additional
major support comes from the National Institute of Health.
PSC's mission is to develop and make available state-of-the-
art high-performance computing for scientific researchers
nationwide. 

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

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