Cray Research Contact: Steve Conway, 612/683-7133

NEW PARALLEL SUPERCOMPUTER FOR GRAND CHALLENGE SCIENCE

SERC to purchase fastest supercomputer in Europe

LONDON, Feb. 3, 1994 -- The Science and Engineering Research Council has
chosen a 256- node Cray T3D parallel supercomputer for use in 'Grand
Challenge' scientific applications. The system offers over five times the
power of any existing UK academic facility, and will provide world-class high
performance computing facilities to UK researchers for use in areas where
computational work will play a central role. These will include major
projects in oceanographic and atmospheric science, studies of the structures
of new materials, realistic simulation of complex structural and fluid flow
problems in engineering applications, modelling of large molecules, and
simulation of the fundamental constituents of matter. The very large real
memory (16 GBytes) will allow problems that cannot be run on any current UK
facility to be tackled in an internationally competitive way.

After a separate tendering exercise, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
(EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh has been chosen to provide a national
service based on the new system. EPCC has an international reputation in
parallel computing, and has put together an attractive package which will
provide significant additional capacity at no cost to the academic community.
The extra capacity will be shared between academic work and industrial
exploitation based on EPCC's consultancy services. This is in line with the
aims of the Government White Paper "Realising our Potential: A Strategy for
Science, Engineering and Technology."

The new system is being provided as part of an continuing programme of
investment in national high performance computing facilities, and will be
available to users from all the research councils' communities. (The SERC
acts as agent for the Office of Science and Technology to provide High
Performance Computing for all research councils.) The system will complement
existing national vector supercomputer facilities at the University of London
Computer Centre (ULCC), Manchester Computing Centre (MCC), and the Atlas
Centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

Following extensive evaluation and benchmarking, the system (which will be
the most powerful in Europe) was chosen from amongst a number of very
competitive offers for its good performance across a wide range of scientific
areas. It will be installed in April 1994, and come into service during the
summer.

Professor Phil Burke, CBE FRS, chairman of the SERC's Supercomputing
Management Committee and member of Council, said: "This exciting new
procurement will provide an enormous stimulus to computational science and
engineering in the UK, enabling a wide range of new Grand Challenge
applications to be addressed for the first time. It will also provide an
important stimulus to collaborative work involving academia and industry,
fulfilling one of the major goals of the recent Government White Paper."

Professor Richard Catlow of the Royal Institution (who produced the report on
Research Requirements for High Performance Computing which preceded the
procurement) added: "The massively parallel CRAY T3D system will give UK
computational scientists unique opportunities to tackle 'grand challenge'
problems in Materials and Biological sciences, as well as in engineering and
environmental science. It will allow problems of vastly greater complexity to
be investigated by computational techniques and will allow these techniques
to investigate problems of real importance in industry and society."

Dr Paul Valdez of the NERC welcomed the new MPP service at Edinburgh, and
commented that: "Environmental scientists studying climate and climate change
are currently major users of the national supercomputing facilities - with
the new machine, we will be able to do some exciting new science that will
improve our understanding of climate and increase our confidence in computer
models of future climate change."

Further information can be obtained from:

Rob Whetnall                   Arthur Trew
SERC                           Edinburgh Parallel
SWINDON                        Computing Centre 
Phone:  (0793) 411810          The University of
FAX:   (0793) 411099           Edinburgh 
E-mail:                        031-650-5025
R.Whetnall@ulcc.ac.uk

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