Media:Mardi Schmieder, 612/683-3538



CRAY RESEARCH ANNOUNCES NEWEST RELEASE OF 

ENGINEERING GRAPHICS SOFTWARE 



MPGS 5.0 Development Aided By World's Largest Utility Company



EAGAN, Minn., July 29, 1993 -- Cray Research, Inc. announced today the newest version of its

popular MPGS engineering graphics software package, currently in use at more than 70 of the

world's leading manufacturers and academic institutions.  The new version, MPGS 5.0, is

designed to further increase the productivity of engineers who tackle large-scale

supercomputing problems. 



MPGS 5.0 software was developed in collaboration with Electricit‚ de France (EDF), Clamart,

France, the world's largest utility, Cray Research officials said.  The new product features

many new advanced capabilities and includes support for additional graphics workstations. 



Cray Research's MPGS 5.0 will support graphics workstations from IBM, Hewlett-Packard,

Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation/Kubota, and Silicon Graphics.  Prior

versions of MPGS were available for IBM and Silicon Graphics workstations only. 

 

MPGS is a post-processing and graphics package that is used to analyze, interpret, and visualize

engineering design problems run on Cray Research supercomputers.  The software exploits

distributed computing, which combines the strengths of supercomputers and graphics

workstations to solve computational problems.  MPGS software utilizes the supercomputer for

compute-intensive calculations and the workstation for 3-D graphics transformations and

image rendering. 



EDF has been using Cray Research systems for engineering and design for more than a decade.

EDF recently ordered a CRAY C98 supercomputer, the electric utility's fourth-generation Cray

Research system, which will be used for engineering applications including structural analysis, 

electromagnetics, nuclear physics and fluid dynamics simulations relating to power

transmission, new nuclear power plant design, and current nuclear plant operations.  Requiring

a company-standard engineering post-processor, EDF chose to work with Cray Research on the

MPGS 5.0 development project.  The organization took delivery of the MPGS 5.0 package last

month, Cray Research officials said.



"To replace EDF's in-house tools to visualize data of computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

problems, we decided to analyze the user requirements from scratch," said Francois Guy,

software engineer at EDF.  "No available commercial tool was able to meet all our requirements,

but MPGS met many of them.  The collaboration with Cray on this project was attractive and

gainful.  We intend to use MPGS not only in CFD, but will promote it in other areas like

structural analysis.  We know that the improved software will increase the productivity of our

engineers by reducing the time required to analyze and interpret supercomputer simulation

results."



MPGS software supports dozens of the most commonly used engineering analysis packages for

structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics including MSC/NASTRAN, LS-DYNA3D,

FLUENT, FIDAP, and STAR-CD, said Sara Graffunder, director of applications for Cray Research.   

She noted that nearly every automotive company throughout the world uses MPGS for car design,

engineering and manufacturing problems.  Additional MPGS users include several international

aerospace companies, research labs, universities and even a Japanese construction company,

which uses the software package to post-process and visualize engineering problems involving

airflow within and around skyscrapers in downtown Tokyo.



"Our goal with MPGS 5.0 is to reduce time-to-solution for a variety of engineering applications

spanning many industries,"  said Graffunder.  "Fast hardware and sophisticated analysis

software are of little use if the tools used to interpret the vast quantities of resulting data are

not intuitive and as easy-to-use as possible." 



Post-processing software packages like MPGS allow users to take supercomputer simulation

results and create easy-to-interpret visual images.



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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