Eagan, MN -- Cray Research, the supercomputing subsidiary of Silicon
Graphics, announced that the Cray T3E-900 system, reportedly the world's
most powerful commercially available supercomputer ever delivered, recently
achieved milestone results on real-world applications in weather, materials
science and chemistry research, extending the upper limits of applications
performance.

  The T3E-900 System features 1,328 processors with 128 MB memory per
processor and a peak systems FLOPS rate of 1.195 Teraflops. The system is
liquid cooled and is composed of 5 LC cabinets. The system measures 40" x
83" stands 79" tall and weighs in at 22,500 pounds.

  Scientists representing a variety of disciplines used the CRAY T3E-900
system for a three-week period before the system was shipped to an
undisclosed customer site last month. Researchers using the system each ran
codes that could achieve significant advancements in their fields of
science and research. The codes were ported quickly and achieved crucial
results in a small time frame.

  "The CRAY T3E line of supercomputers gives our customers access to
unprecedented levels of scalability," said Irene Qualters, president of
Cray Research and senior vice president of Silicon Graphics. "By providing
time on this enormous CRAY T3E-900 system to researchers, we are not only
giving scientists the chance to achieve significant results, we're also
demonstrating the practical, real-world uses of parallel systems with more
than a thousand processors."

  Researchers used the system to run real-world applications at unmatched
levels of performance. Performance data for several specific applications
will be released during the next couple of weeks.

  For Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the Center for Analysis and
Prediction of Storms (CAPS) at the University of Oklahoma, the CRAY T3E-900
supercomputer enabled improvements in work with the Advanced Regional
Prediction System (ARPS), storm prediction computer model. The work was an
extension of research previously pursued at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center on another Cray system.

  "In meteorology, getting fast results is critical," Droegemeier said.
"The time we spent on this huge CRAY T3E-900 system gave us valuable
insight into how we can extend our predictions from 30 minutes to up to six
hours. That advanced warning time will save countless lives and billions of
dollars."

  Other organizations that used the CRAY T3E-900 system include: Center for
Non-Linear Dynamics, University of Texas, used MGFlow to advance the study
of thin films in low orbit.-- The Space Research Department, University of
Michigan, used the CRAY T3E-900 system to develop the first 3-D,
multi-scale model of the heliosphere.-- High Resolution Limited Area Model
Consortium used HIRLAM in the creation of a numerical short-range weather
forecasting system in Northern Europe.-- Los Alamos National Laboratory
used the Los Alamos Terra Code in its Earth modeling research.-- Ecole
Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) used LAUTREC to conduct molecular
dynamics solutions used in medical research.-- Pacific Northwest National
Labs used NWChem for its research on more scalable Quantum chemistry.

  The CRAY T3E-900 system enables Cray customers to achieve results not
possible with any other system. "The CRAY T3E-900 supercomputer provides an
environment for very easy applications scaling, creating enormous
implications for a number of industries," said Qualters. "As we move toward
the future, we are going to see a number of industries, including energy
and petroleum, university research and government, deploy computers of this
size."