From: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (Steve Stevenson-Moderator) Subject: News release on MPP Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (Steve Stevenson) >Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1992 17:37:28 GMT Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu [I saw this circulating at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. Thought it would be of interest. Steve] From: Mark Reynolds CRAY RESEARCH SELECTS DIGITAL'S ALPHA MICROPROCESSOR FOR FIRST-PHASE MPP SYSTEM PARIS, February 12, 1992 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR), plans to use the Alpha RISC microprocessor developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital) for its first- generation massively parallel processing (MPP) system, announced John A. Rollwagen, Cray Research chairman and CEO, at the Supercomputing Europe `92 conference that opened here today. The company has placed an order for Alpha microprocessors to be used in Cray Research's MPP system scheduled for delivery in 1993, Rollwagen said. "We selected the Alpha microprocessor for our first MPP system because it delivers leading-edge, single-chip functionality and performance. Each Alpha processor is expected to have roughly the same peak performance as a CRAY-1 system," he said. Terms of the purchase order were not disclosed. Rollwagen said Cray Research has established a strong relationship with Digital and was able to influence Alpha's design to include features Cray Research considers important for the company's first MPP system. "Cray Research's choice of Digital's 64-bit microprocessor for its first MPP system confirms that Alpha is the highest- performing microprocessor available and demonstrates Cray Researchs confidence in Digital's ability to provide open solutions for its technology partners," said William Demmer, Digital's vice president of VAX VMS Systems and Servers. Details of the Alpha microprocessor will be announced by Digital later this month, he said. "Alpha is similar to the Cray Research architecture," said Steve Nelson, Cray Research vice president of technology. "The chip supports 64-bit integer, logical and floating point operations; its high clock rate will work well with the interconnect network we are designing; and its supercomputer- level scalar speed should alleviate many of the performance problems in current MPP systems." Nelson said Cray Research's unique MPP strategy is to closely couple microprocessor technology with the company's general- purpose, parallel vector architecture. "We think this balanced, heterogeneous computing environment offers customers the best solution for the 1990s," he said. "MPP systems are best suited for solving very highly parallel application programs. For the foreseeable future, many scientific and industrial programs will continue to require powerful vector-scalar performance. Our coupled MPP systems will make it possible to efficiently distribute applications across the two architectures for superior performance on programs of virtually any mathematical nature." Cray Research has a three-phase MPP program, Nelson said. The program's goals are to deliver the first-phase system, with more than 100 gigaFLOPS (100 billion floating point operations per second) of peak performance, in 1993; the second-phase MPP system, scalable to one teraFLOPS (one trillion floating point operations per second) of peak performance, in 1995; and the third-phase system, with sustained performance of one teraFLOPS on real customer codes, in 1997. Nelson said DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. government, recently agreed to provide $12.7 million in funding support for the first three years of Cray Research's MPP program. The first-phase system, Nelson said, will feature shared memory, Multiple-Instruction, Multiple-Data (MIMD) architecture and "a system network that will interconnect the powerful Alpha microprocessors at speeds an order of magnitude faster than those of current MPP systems." Regarding chip selection for the company's second-phase MPP system and beyond, Nelson said, "Cray Research's first-phase system will have a modular architecture that allows us to use the most advanced microprocessor technology available for future phases of the program. We will make those decisions at the appropriate times." MPP systems harness hundreds or thousands of relatively inexpensive microprocessors together to solve a problem. Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest-quality computational tools for solving the world's most challenging scientific and industrial problems.