Cray/Media: Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538 Cray/Financial: Brad Allen, 612/ 683-7395 CRAY RESEARCH ANNOUNCES CLUSTERING SOFTWARE FOR HETEROGENEOUS NETWORKS Best of Class Software Technology Enhances Scalability, Flexibility of Company's Supercomputer Line EAGAN, Minn., Nov. 3, 1994 -- Cray Research, Inc. today announced the SuperCluster product, a unique new suite of high-performance, open software tools that allow users to efficiently cluster multiple Cray Research supercomputers along with systems and equipment from other computer vendors. The SuperCluster capability supports up to 30 Cray Research systems, the company said. This new Cray Research technology begins at $4,100 (U.S.) and enables customers to get the most from their computing resources, Cray Research officials said. SuperCluster software is available immediately to customers who have or order multiple Cray Research supercomputer systems. The software will be especially attractive packaged with CRAY J916 systems, the company's new compact supercomputer priced from $225,000 (U.S.). The CRAY J916 system will begin shipping early next year. Cray Research said a number of customers have already ordered multiple CRAY J916 systems. The company said an undisclosed government customer plans to combine nine CRAY J916 systems in a SuperCluster environment. Additional customers have installed other Cray Research systems in quantity. According to John Carlson, Cray Research chairman and chief executive officer, the company has been working on this technology for more than five years and has designed, built and installed the largest, most powerful clustered solutions in the world using the highest-performing Cray Research supercomputers as base components. These clustered installations are at undisclosed government sites and have included as many as six high-end, 16-processor CRAY C90 supercomputers, he said. "This barrier-breaking technology used to be available only as special configurations to customers purchasing our top-of- the-line systems," said Carlson. "Now we are making the SuperCluster product available on our most affordable systems, creating integrated supercomputer clusters at prices comparable to high-end workstation clusters and providing a more scalable parallel processing path for our customers." Carlson said clustering is increasingly popular because customers can start with low-priced systems and boost computing capacity (scalability) by adding more systems as budgets and workloads dictate. The process is transparent to end users who access the clustered resources from desktop computers. "The key differentiator is that previous clusters have linked together multiple workstations to provide the power of one small supercomputer. Our SuperCluster product couples multiple low-priced supercomputers to provide a far more efficient and powerful solution," Carlson said. With a SuperCluster configuration, each node is a complete, multiprocessing Cray Research supercomputer with a balanced system design matching fast processors with industry-leading input/output (I/O) and interprocessor speeds and large memory bandwidths, he said. With the CRAY J916 as the base component for the SuperCluster environment, each node has as many as 16 processors that can be efficiently used to process workload. In fact, the CRAY J916 system design typically allows user to achieve 60 to 70 percent of the system's total 3.2 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second) peak performance, Carlson noted. "Acting as a node in a SuperCluster, the CRAY J916 system can distribute applications and balance workloads across its internal processors, eliminating the network transfer delays (latencies) that would compromise performance on the same job in a clustered workstation environment," said Carlson. The Cray Research SuperCluster product: - Can provide up to 100 gigaflops peak performance when CRAY J916 systems are used as base component. - Is based on industry-standard software, enabling many non- Cray Research systems to be integrated into the clustered environment for true heterogeneous computing. This feature lets customers integrate the diverse computing systems -- from workstations to servers and supercomputers -- already on their network into a single coordinated resource. - Has a sophisticated Cray-engineered network load balancer called Network Queuing Environment (NQE) that monitors workload on all systems in the cluster and engages the most appropriate resource(s) for a given job. NQE, based on industry-standard NQS with Cray Research enhancements, is also available on a variety of workstations and servers, providing an open solution to the clustered network load balancing problem. - Supports industry-standard Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) for writing distributed applications. This support provides even higher levels of parallelism and ensures portability of applications. - Offers industry-standard Network File System (NFS) and Distributed File System (DFS), providing open systems solutions for accessing files stored on remote systems as if they were stored locally. DFS adds security to remote file access and improves performance through a client caching system. - Has an optional Shared File System (SFS) feature, providing shared file access at speeds 10 to 20 times faster than typical network file systems. This unique feature allows all files stored in the cluster to be accessible to all Cray Research systems, reducing the need to move the data between systems on the network. Carlson noted that Cray Research has a long history in parallel processing. Cray was the first company to offer a parallel UNIX operating environment, supplied with both the CRAY X-MP and CRAY-2 multiprocessing supercomputer systems in 1985. The vectorization capability of the company's parallel vector systems is itself a form of parallelism that allows computations on array elements to be processed in parallel, he said. The company's CRAY T3D system, introduced in late 1993 and available with up to 2048 processors, is the leading massively parallel processing (MPP) system in the scientific and technical market, he said. "We are no strangers to the parallel world," Carlson said. "With our announcement today of the SuperCluster software we are providing additional parallel options to our customers and prospects." Cray Research provides the leading high-performance computing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. ###