CRAY PUSHES STANDARDS FURTHER WITH UPDATED PARALLEL PROGRAMMING
ENVIRONMENTS, NEW MESSAGE PASSING TOOLKIT

New and Upgraded Tools Bring Scalable High Performance and Portability

EAGAN, Minn., Mar. 5, 1996 -- Cray Research, Inc. today introduced updated
versions of its parallel programming environments and a new Cray Message
Passing Toolkit product -- software products that effectively raise the bar
for application performance, portability and ease-of-use in scalable
parallel computing. Cray officials said these enhanced programming
environments further the company's objective to broaden the scope and
accessibility of applications for its parallel systems; they combine
standards-compliant languages and libraries, expert systems programming
tools, and industry-leading scalability and performance.

"Our goal is to bring tools to market that ease parallel programming efforts
while providing for real portability and scalability of applications from
just a few parallel processors to hundreds -- even thousands -- of
processors," said Irene Qualters, executive vice president, Cray
Supercomputing Systems Unit. "These enhanced programming environments
reflect an ongoing commitment to software innovation through which Cray has
contributed significant technology advancement to the industry -- not only
in parallel processing -- but in Client/Server and open systems, including
64-bit standards-compliant operating systems."

Cray's parallel programming environments for its supercomputers include the
first native Fortran 90 implementation from a computer vendor (first
released in 1993); the highest performing C++ compiler in the industry; and
expert systems capabilities in the updated CrayTools package that provides
detailed performance analysis and recommendations to improve applications
through better parallel processing. These leading programming environments
and products provide an integrated set of the most powerful application
development tools available, including optimizing compilers, high
performance libraries, advanced debugging and performance analysis tools, as
well as the most flexible parallel programming tools in the industry.

The updated programming products are further enhanced by the introduction of
the Cray Message Passing Toolkit, a new consolidated high-performance
message passing/data passing product that optimizes inter- and intra-node
message-passing/data-passing communications -- delivering a performance
boost across all Cray's programming environments and Cray parallel systems.

The new toolkit product combines optimized versions of de facto standard
Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM)
message-passing standards with Cray's innovative shared memory data-passing
library (libsma), providing significant performance increases while
retaining message-passing portability. For example, the Cray Message Passing
Toolkit PVM implementation provides up to 45 times the bandwidth of public
domain PVM with up to 4 times reduction in latency, and with Cray's libsma
for shared memory parallel systems, Cray expects up to 40 times reduction in
latency compared to public domain PVM.

According to Cray, introduction of this product provides Cray customers with
consistent, optimized message-passing and data-passing programming models
increasing performance across Cray's supercomputer systems, including the
company's distributed memory and shared memory supercomputers. In addition,
all third party applications which use message-passing for parallel
communication will benefit from the increased performance provided by the
Message Passing Toolkit.

Cray Fortran 90

The Cray F90 Programming Environment Version 2.0 replaces Cray CF77 as the
industry-leading optimizing Fortran compiler by providing equivalent or
better performance and equivalent functionality to CF77 programming
environment. Extensive performance testing indicates that the CF90 2.0
compiler provides equivalent or better performance than CF77 on many third
party applications. CF90 outperforms CF77 on single processor applications
by an average of 5 to 10 percent.

To enhance portability, CF90 supports both ISO and ANSI standards for
Fortran 90 and the full Fortran 90 and FORTRAN 77 languages, as well as most
Cray Fortran language extensions supported by CF77 6.0.

Cray C++

The Cray C++ Programming Environment 2.0 features a native, complete C++
compiler implementation that is expected to outperform any competitive C++
translator product. It utilizes the same optimizing, Autotasking technology
found in Cray Fortran 90 compiler and offers comparable portability. The
Cray C++ Programming Environment supports the C and C++ languages, as well
as most C language extensions. The C language support complies with
standards ISO/IEC 9899:1009 and ANSI X3.159-1989. And while there are no
approved C++ standards, Cray is tracking the ISO and ANSI draft standards
and plans to comply with the final standard upon its approval.

To receive a copy of the new Cray Programming Environments Brochure or
additional information call 1-800-289-CRAY or send your request to
crayinfo@cray.com.

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

Cray/Media:      Steve Conway, 612/683-7133