Cray/Media:         Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538
ANSYS, Inc/Media:   Mary Brahney, 412/873-2868

CRAY RESEARCH AND ANSYS, INC. ANNOUNCE JOINT
EFFORTS FOR EXPANDED PARALLEL PROCESSING IN
ANSYS 

Time-to-Solution Reduced For Many Problems With New
Version And Parallel Cray Systems

DETROIT, Nov. 15, 1994 -- At the Society of Manufacturing
Engineers (SME) AutoFact '94 conference held here this week,
Cray Research and ANSYS, Inc. announced joint efforts to
expand parallel processing capabilities of the ANSYS finite
element analysis code on Cray Research's parallel vector
supercomputing line.

The ANSYS program is used for structural analysis simulations
in the areas of product design, testing and manufacturability,
ANSYS, Inc. officials said.  The software package is very
popular among industrial users that compute large-scale
modeling and simulation problems on products such as
automobiles and components, aircraft and other manufactured
goods.

ANSYS software has been available on Cray Research
supercomputers for more than 15 years.  The improved parallel
features are currently under development and are anticipated
to be released in Revision 5.2 of ANSYS on the entire line of
Cray Research supercomputers, from the company's low-cost,
compact supercomputers beginning at prices ranging from
$150,000 to $225,000, to the top-end 16 processor CRAY C916.  

At the conference, Cray and ANSYS officials said that the
parallel processing performance of the ANSYS program on Cray
Research supercomputers, especially for very large problems,
has been internationally recognized in recent years.  Last year
the ANSYS/Cray Research solution was nominated as a finalist
for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize awarded each year for
parallel processing performance and also cited in Europe at
SuParCup '93 in an international parallel processing
performance competition.  This recognition was given for
sustained performance of six billion operations per second (six
gigaflops) on a CRAY C916 multiprocessor supercomputer for
an analysis of a new design for NASA's Space Shuttle Liquid
Oxygen Pump.  

The analysis involved one of the largest ANSYS models ever
run, solving a simulation of the pump housing response to
extreme thermal and pressure loads.  The simulation involved a
system of equations with nearly a quarter of a million
unknowns solved in just over three hours elapsed time. 
Recently there have been large model simulations using ANSYS
software on the CRAY C916 supercomputer that have exceeded
half a million equations solved, according to Sara Graffunder,
director of Cray Research's applications group.

"Our parallel vector product line remains the industrial
workhorse for the majority of today's real-world production
work," Graffunder said.  "Previous work to exploit the parallel
processing capabilities of Cray systems in large applications
codes like ANSYS has been concentrated only in the single area
of equation solvers.  This joint work represents a significant
step forward for a commercially available applications code
and we expect it to result in reduced time-to-solutions for our
customers."

With the soon-to-be-available parallel processing capabilities
in the ANSYS program individual elements can be processed in
parallel on each of the vector processors, Graffunder said. 
These parallel enhancements of ANSYS for Cray Research
systems will be effective on Cray's full supercomputing line,
including the new CRAY J916 supercomputer, Cray Research's
new low-cost, compact supercomputer that is offered with up
to 16 processors.  Cray Research has already received more
than 50 advance orders for this system, scheduled to begin
shipping in early 1995.  

According to John Swanson, ANSYS, Inc. chief technologist and
founder, the parallel enhancements in the ANSYS program are
based on a newly designed database and code restructuring. 
The changes allow simultaneous computation of individual
elements -- which may number in the hundreds of thousands
for detailed model simulations -- on multiple processors such
as those in Cray Research supercomputers.

"The usually complex task of identifying shared and local data
dependencies in a large applications code and locating the key
areas adaptable for parallelization will be built into ANSYS," 
according to Gene Poole, senior applications analyst at Cray
Research.  "This makes our job easier, and enhances the
productivity of our customers that use ANSYS software."  

ANSYS, Inc. develops, markets and supports the ANSYS program,
one of the world's leading computer-aided engineering analysis
and design optimization programs, and the ANSYS family of
products.  Based in Houston, PA., just outside of Pittsburgh,
ANSYS, Inc. serves customers and markets worldwide. 

Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest-quality
computational tools for solving the world's most challenging
scientific and industrial problems.

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