CRAY RESEARCH UNVEILS EMULATOR FOR FIRST MPP SYSTEM Software Tool Gives Users Head Start In Developing Applications For CRAY T3D System Due Out Later This Year EAGAN, Minn., June 2, 1993 -- Cray Research, Inc. today introduced the CRAY T3D Emulator, a pioneering software tool that will give customers a head start in developing high- performance applications programs for the company's first massively parallel processing (MPP) system, the CRAY T3D system, due out later this year. The Emulator can be used on existing Cray Research parallel vector supercomputers to mimic the traits of the MPP system. The new software product will be supplied free of charge with licenses for the latest version of the company's Fortran programming environment, announced separately today. The Emulator is important, company officials said, because of the difficulty programmers have had in developing applications software for MPP systems, which harness hundreds or thousands of microprocessors to solve problems. "Only a handful of important commercial applications exist for MPP systems today," said Steve Nelson, Cray Research vice president of technology and head of the company's MPP program. "We expect the CRAY T3D Emulator to pave the way for increased numbers of MPP applications that will run on the CRAY T3D system at higher performance levels than are possible with other MPP systems." "Applications are the key to the success of any MPP system today," said Michael Levine, scientific co-director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), which received an early release of the Emulator. "We have been using the Emulator and see it -- as well as all the other MPP applications initiatives Cray is undertaking -- as a real asset to Cray Research's MPP offering." Dr. Ralph Roskies, scientific co-director at PSC, said, "We are finding the Emulator very valuable as we prepare to receive one of the first CRAY T3D systems later this year." Nelson said Cray Research has 30 software specialists working on major MPP applications projects for the petroleum, chemistry, automotive and other targeted industries. He said the company is also partnering with several leading customers on MPP applications projects, including PSC and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which is also scheduled to take delivery of one of the first CRAY T3D systems in 1993. The Emulator is an early-access version of Cray Research's flexible programming environment that will be supplied with the CRAY T3D system, Nelson said. This programming environment will be the first to embrace the full set of emerging MPP programming standards, including data parallelism, control parallelism, and message-passing. The Emulator and later programming environment will enhance performance on MPP applications by taking maximum advantage of data stored locally on the individual processors. According to Nelson, an application that efficiently exploits this "data locality" concept could run as much as several times faster than one that doesn't. Nelson stressed that data sometimes need to be fetched from distant processors, however, and this has caused significant performance bottlenecks in current MPP systems from other vendors. He said Cray Research expects the CRAY T3D system to alleviate these bottlenecks by moving data between processors an order- of-magnitude faster than these other systems. "The Emulator is an important development tool for exploiting the extraordinary performance of the CRAY T3D," Nelson said. "This pioneering tool is part of our overall strategy for making MPP useful for the first time on a broad spectrum of applications in commercial production environments. Our flexible MPP programming model and the balanced architecture, globally addressed shared memory and latency- hiding features of the CRAY T3D hardware will result in the first MPP with true supercomputer performance." The Emulator allows programmers to develop MPP supercomputer applications on Cray Research's parallel vector systems -- specifically, to study the data layout and reference patterns, data locality and memory usage of these applications so that they can be efficiently mapped onto the CRAY T3D MPP system architecture. The CRAY T3D system is the first-phase system in Cray Research's three-phase MPP program. This system features a heterogeneous architecture that closely couples Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha microprocessors and Cray Research's parallel-vector technology (CRAY Y-MP and CRAY C90). This balanced strategy, the company said, is needed to help mature MPP technology. Cray Research's MPP program targets a peak teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) performance in the mid-1990s, and a sustained teraflops in the late 1990s. Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest-quality computational tools for solving the world's most challenging scientific and industrial problems. ### -- -- Conrad Anderson Employee Communications (612) 683-7338