Cray/Media: Steve Conway, 612/683-7133 Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538 Cray/Financial: Brad Allen, 612/683-7395 CRAY RESEARCH DOUBLES TOP PERFORMANCE OF FAST- SELLING CRAY J90 PRODUCT LINE New CRAY J932 UNIX-Based Systems Scale Low-Cost Supercomputer Line Up To 32 Processors, 6.4 Billion Calculations Per Second DALLAS, March 13, 1995 -- At the UniForum 95 open computing conference, Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE: CYR) announced today its new CRAY J932 supercomputer that doubles the maximum performance of the company's fastest- selling product line ever -- the CRAY J90 series of low-cost, UNIX-based supercomputer systems. The new CRAY J932 products are air-cooled, compact supercomputer systems with 16 to 32 processors that provide up to 6.4 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) of peak computing speed -- twice the maximum offered in the previously announced, binary-compatible CRAY J916 systems, Cray officials said. The CRAY J932 systems, slated to begin shipping in second-quarter of this year, are priced in the U.S. from under $1 million to about $2.6 million. Cray reported it has already received 11 advance orders for the new CRAY J932 systems. The orders are from British Gas, London, England; Howard University, Washington D.C.; Penn State University, University Park, Penn.; University Groningen, The Netherlands; and two German organizations, Konrad-Zuse- Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin (Konrad-Zuse Center for Information Technology Berlin), and the Christian- Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel (University of Kiel). An additional undisclosed customer has ordered five CRAY J932 systems that will be clustered using Cray Research's SuperCluster software environment. Terms were not disclosed. The CRAY J90 Series is aimed at small- to mid-sized organizations, or departments within larger organizations, that do scientific and technical simulation work in the government, industrial and university sectors. These Cray systems are designed to operate as simulation servers for large, complex problems that exhaust the capabilities of workstations and workstation-based server products. A single CRAY J932 system's large, real central memory -- up to eight gigabytes -- can handle heavy workloads that would exhaust the cache memory and memory bandwidths of uniprocessor workstations, Cray said. "Our J90 customers have anywhere from a few users to more than a hundred running a wide range of third-party and proprietary applications," said Robert H. Ewald president and chief operating officer of Cray Research. "Cray Research's complete catalogue of more than 600 third-party supercomputer applications is available on these systems, compared with far fewer application offerings on competing systems. The CRAY J90 systems are the most general-purpose supercomputers in their price class." The company has captured about 100 orders for the CRAY J916 supercomputer, the smaller system in the series that was announced in September 1994, Ewald said. The CRAY J916 systems begin volume shipments this month, at U.S. list prices ranging from $225,000 to $1.5 million for systems with four to 16 processors and up to 3.2 gigaflops of peak performance. He said nearly 40 percent of the 110 CRAY J90 Series orders are from new customers. "With the volume of CRAY J90 Series orders already in hand, we are well on our way to, in 1995, substantially increasing Cray Research's share in the growing open systems market for high-performance simulation servers," Ewald said. According to Gary Smaby, president of Smaby Group, Inc., a high-performance computing (HPC) analyst firm in Minneapolis, "Early order activity leads us to believe that with the J90 Series, Cray has finally hit on a compelling combination of price, performance and application breadth to address the sub- $2 million HPC server market. While Cray historically has dominated the market for high-end enterprise supercomputers, the company has not had a significant presence in this price tier. We expect the J90 Series to finally put Cray on the map in this billion dollar, 30+ percent growth market tier, propelling the company from a mere three percent market share in 1994 to a respectable 11 percent by year end. "In our view, the catalyst will be the ability of CRAY J90 Series users to gain plug and play' access to Cray's impressive third-party applications library -- including the fifty or so key codes which drive the majority of the HPC systems sales in this price range." Ewald said that the CRAY J90 Series systems are scaled down versions of Cray Research's proven supercomputing technology combined with the cost advantages of CMOS. To maintain the product line's unrivaled performance on real-world applications -- which average 60 to 70 percent of peak processor speed -- Cray has doubled the maximum memory bandwidth over the CRAY J916 system to 51.2 billion bytes (gigabytes) per second in the CRAY J932 system. This memory bandwidth is more than 20 times faster than similarly priced competing products and maintains Cray's leadership in high- bandwidth computing, Ewald said. The new systems are based on custom RISC microprocessors that Cray designed and has manufactured by an undisclosed outside vendor, Ewald said. The microprocessor is two CMOS ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) with approximately 800,000 cells per chip. The microprocessor is an innovative design that reduces the Cray Research central processing unit (CPU) -- previously consisting of hundreds of chips and multiple multi-layered printed circuit boards -- to two powerful processor chips and a handful of supporting chips, he said. "All Cray supercomputers to date have been based on RISC architecture. In fact, in the world of supercomputing, the Cray RISC architecture is the most commonly used," Ewald said. "By applying the price/performance advantages of CMOS to our proven architecture, our new J90 line features RISC microprocessors tuned specifically for hundreds of supercomputing applications." Ewald said the CRAY J932 supercomputers: - Can be installed in an office environment with standard air conditioning. - Offer sustained multiple gigaflops on a wide range of applications for under $1.5 million. - Are compatible with workstations and designed to operate in a client/server environment. As a central simulation server, the CRAY J932 supercomputer is an open system and easily connects to workstation devices made by a variety of suppliers. It also supports the most popular workstation data formats with transparent, automatic data conversion. - Run the same standard UNIX operating system (UNICOS) as larger Cray systems, with multi-user features and other enhancements for the demanding high-end computing market. - Have unmatched, flexible scaling features. Scalability of competing low-cost supercomputers is limited by adding another processor or workstation to the cluster. Many of these products rely on the low speeds of ethernet as their "system" interconnect and offer limited scalability, as they are confined to low-end configurations when total system performance is considered. With the CRAY J932 system's balanced design and leading bandwidth, customers can easily and inexpensively add processors at $30,000 each (U.S. list price) in a single system chassis and gain significantly more from the addition of the processors. - Are based on Cray Research supercomputer technology for industry-leading "delivered" price/performance. Because of the system's leading bandwidth of 51.2 gigabytes per second, the sustained-to-peak ratio for this system on a wide range of application far exceeds the competition. Per processor the system achieves from 60-70 percent of its peak speed of 200 megaflops (million floating-point operations per second). - Can be clustered with Cray's SuperCluster software environment, providing virtually unlimited, versatile capacity upgrades and total peak capabilities as high as 200 gigaflops. With this Cray software, customers can link multiple supercomputers for a tightly integrated distributed memory environment to tackle even larger workloads. Cray today also announced that it has received Advanced Systems Magazine's 1994 Best Products Award for the previous-generation CRAY EL94 system that was introduced last year. Cray officials will be given this award at a luncheon ceremony held here at the UniForum show tomorrow. Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. ### Editor's Note: A CRAY J916 system is being showcased in Cray's booth (#2125) at the UniForum conference and exhibition held here.