Aggregate I/O bandwidth up to 6.4 gigabytes/second available with latest RACE series.

WASHINGTON, D.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 26, 1997--

Mercury Computer Systems Announces Dual- and Quad-Port Systems Which

Scale to 1,000 Processors

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. announced today at the DSP World Spring Design Conference the company's technology strategy to provide an aggregate I/O bandwidth for its RACE(R) Series of multicomputers of up to 6.4 Gbytes/second. The strategy, which includes the introduction of new system models in the second half of this year, will allow RACE systems to scale in excess of one thousand processors of mixed types, while maintaining a single-system logical view for the developer.

The RACE Series has been successfully installed in high-bandwidth, real-time, embedded signal processing applications operating in the harshest environments. Mercury's strategy is to provide new systems that will support emerging ultra-high-end applications - such as foliage- and ground-penetrating radar, space-time adaptive processing (STAP), and automatic target recognition (ATR) - that have very high bandwidth and compute requirements.

"We are seeing a demand for higher bandwidth from almost every market segment," said Jay Bertelli, president and CEO of Mercury Computer Systems. "This phase of our technology strategy provides a fourfold increase in I/O bandwidth and helps designers of the most advanced commercial and military applications handle the vast increases in data which their applications are experiencing."

Mercury's systems use a high-bandwidth system area network (SAN) interconnect architecture using a series of six-port crossbar switches. The interconnect, adopted as an ANSI/VITA standard (ANSI/VITA 5-1994), is called RACEway Interlink. Current RACE Series systems have a single RACEway Interlink port connecting each board to the SAN.

Mercury's technology strategy includes the introduction of new systems which will implement dual- and quad-port RACEway SAN interconnects. The dual-port implementation, which uses the 160-pin VMEbus can be configured to provide an aggregate I/O bandwidth of more than 2.5 Gbytes/second and will be backward-compatible with the current RACEway Interlink standard. Mercury announced last week it will submit the specifications for the dual- port interconnect to the VME International Trade Association (VITA) Standards Organization for review and approval as an extension to the existing standard.

The quad-port systems will house several standard VMEbus slots, which will accept standard VMEbus boards as well as single- and dual-port RACEway boards, and they will contain quad-port slots designed for massive real-time processing compute engines. The number of each type of slot in a given system will depend upon the model being ordered. A single chassis can be configured with an aggregate bandwidth of up to 6.4 Gbytes/second.

The new systems have already notched significant design wins, including requirements to scale to over one thousand processors, underlining the position of Mercury's RACE Series of multicomputers as the system of choice for applications demanding maximum processing power/watt/cubic foot.

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. is a technology company specializing in high-performance computing solutions for diagnostic medical imaging, commercial and defense image and signal processing, and servers for digital media editing. Mercury's RACE Series, with its heterogeneous multicomputing hardware and software architecture, allows customers to build the most cost-effective system for their applications. -0- Visit Mercury on the Web at http://www.mc.com

CONTACT: Leigh McLeod

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc.

[phone]

or

Krystyna Stachowiak

Coltrin & Associates

[phone]