Steve Conway:    612-683-7133
Cray/Financial:  Bill Gacki 612-683-7372
Visual Numerics: Peter Masi 303-581-3403

CRAY RESEARCH, VISUAL NUMERICS SIGN JOINT
TECHNOLOGY AND DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT FOR
FORTRAN 90 SOFTWARE PRODUCTS

PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 16, 1993 -- Cray Research, Inc., and
Visual Numerics, Inc., today announced at Supercomputing 93
an agreement to cooperate in the development and marketing of
leading Fortran 90 technologies.

Fortran 90 is the next generation of Fortran, replacing
Fortran 77 as the most widely used programming language for
scientific and technical computing.

The agreement calls for Visual Numerics to market and
distribute Cray Research's Fortran 90 (CF90) Programming
Environment for RISC workstations on a non-exclusive,
worldwide basis.  In addition, Visual Numerics will develop the
industry leading IMSL Fortran 90 libraries to interoperate with
the CF90 Programming Environment.  Cray Research has a
worldwide, non-exclusive option to distribute the IMSL Fortran
90 libraries.  Each company will provide support and service
for its own products under the arrangement.  Financial terms
were not disclosed.

Initially targeted under the multi-year agreement are
binary-compatible versions of both companies' products for
SPARC platforms, including Sun products and the recently
announced CS6400 system from subsidiary Cray Research
Superservers.  Availability of these Fortran 90 products is
scheduled by mid-1994.

Versions of both companies' Fortran 90 products for other
platforms, including leading personal computers and
workstations, are slated to be made available for joint
marketing and distribution at later dates.

Cray Research announced the CF90 Programming
Environment yesterday, calling it the first complete
implementation for supercomputers of the new Fortran 90
standards set by the American National Standards Institute
(ANSI) and the International Standards Organization (ISO). 

The company said products based on its CF90 compiler
technology will also be marketed for leading personal
computers, workstation products and servers through CraySoft. 
The CraySoft initiative was announced in October to promote
the marketing of Cray Research software technology on third-
party platforms.  "Our goal is for the CF90 Programming
Environment to become an industry standard,"  said Cray
Research vice president of software Irene Qualters.  "This
agreement is an important milestone in achieving that
objective since it provides the opportunity for Visual
Numerics and Cray Research to offer a combined high-
performance Fortran development environment to an
established base of over 200,000 leading edge IMSL Fortran
users."

"We are very excited about this agreement" said William P.
Hayes, vice president and general manager of Visual Numerics. 
"Cray Research has a solid reputation in the high performance
arena and has always produced high quality products.  With
Fortran 90 as an emerging technology, a joint development of
this type makes everyone a winner -- especially our
customers."

The IMSL Fortran 90 Libraries are collections of user-
callable mathematical and statistical subroutines that help
maximize the performance of computer systems and speed the
development of industry-specific software applications by
providing "building blocks" for the programmer.  By embedding
the Libraries' prepackaged subroutines directly into their
Fortran 90-based applications, programmers avoid having to
write the code from scratch and reduce application
development time by up to 95 percent.

Widely regarded as the standard in numerical libraries, the
IMSL Libraries are comprised of more than 900 subroutines for
general applied mathematics applications and for analyzing
statistical data in scientific and industrial applications.  The
Libraries include routines for linear systems, Eigensystem
analysis, interpolation and approximation, differential
equations, transforms, nonlinear equations, optimization, and
random number generators, among others.

Visual Numerics was formed by the December 1992 merger
of IMSL, the Houston-based developer of numerical and
graphical libraries; and Precision Visuals, the Boulder, Colo.-
based developer of Visual Data Analysis software.  Through its
subsidiaries in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom,
and its worldwide distribution network, Visual Numerics sells
its products in more than 65 countries.

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

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