National Center for Supercomputing Applications Acquires Cray Y-MP System

MINNEAPOLIS, Oct. 23, 1990 -- PRNewswire -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE: CYR) announced today that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has acquired, and is in the process of installing, a CRAY Y-MP supercomputer.

One of four National Science Foundation (NSF) centers in the United States, NCSA was founded to help establish a national supercomputing arena to benefit U.S. academia and industry. NCSA's new system will be used to advance knowledge in a variety of discipline's, including meteorology, chemistry, physics, and astrophysics. NCSA is a pioneer in scientific computer visualization techniques and also is active in studying short-lived local weather phenomena like thunderstorms and tornadoes. In addition, NCSA is a leader in establishing industrial partnerships and has set up associations with several companies in various industries.

"Cray Research is proud to serve such an advanced supercomputer customer like NCSA," said John Rollwagen, Cray Research chairman and chief executive officer. "NCSA's new CRAY Y-MP system will help to further research and development in many academic and industry disciplines, as well as assist in the development of future computational scientists, researchers, and engineers."

NCSA's new CRAY Y-MP system has 64 million words of memory and is capable of performing one billion operations per second. Once installed, the CRAY Y-MP supercomputer will run Cray Research's powerful UNICOS operating system, based on AT&T's UNIX System V. The new system replaces a CRAY X-MP system; NCSA also has a CRAY-2 system.

"The new CRAY Y-MP supercomputer promises much in terms of speed and memory, both of which are important to the research community's ability to run and solve more advanced, computationally intensive problems," said David Curtis, NCSA's associate director of information and publications.

There are currently 37 Cray Research systems installed at 34 universities worldwide. Of these systems, 18 are located in the United States. Of the four NSF centers, three have Cray Research systems installed to meet their supercomputing needs.

Cray Research, Inc. designs, manufactures, markets, and supports large-scale, high-performance computers for scientific and engineering applications. (UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.)

CONTACT: Kate Neessen (media), 612-683-7132; or Laura Merriam (financial), 612-334-6448, both of Cray Research

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