San Diego Supercomputer Center Accepts Tera's Four-Processor MTA System; Another Record Set on Integer Sorting Benchmark: MTA-4 Beats 256-Processor IBM SP2.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 2, 1999--Tera Computer Company (Nasdaq:TERA), a Seattle-based supercomputer company, today announced that the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has accepted Tera's Multithreaded Architecture (MTA) system installed in December. The system contains a four-processor network and four resource modules, consisting of four multithreaded processors, four gigabytes of memory and four I/O processors. The system doubles the size of the MTA system that has been operating at SDSC since last April.

"Given the acceptance by SDSC, our next goal is to build a system with eight resource modules," said Jim Rottsolk, Tera's president and chief executive officer. "Over the course of the year, we plan to increase the size of the system to 16 resource modules, and possibly more.

"Scaling results on the four-resource module system are excellent," added Rottsolk. "As we demonstrate scaling on larger MTA systems, we expect that additional records will be set and that users will see a path to achieving performance and solutions previously unattainable."

The company also announced that it has recorded the fastest performance ever on a slightly modified version of the NASA NAS Parallel Integer Sort benchmark, Version 2.3-serial, Class B.

"We ran this version of Integer Sort in 0.87 seconds, compared with the previously reported record of 1.2 seconds set by a 256-processor IBM SP2," reported Brian Koblenz, Tera's vice president of software. "Last month, we set the Class A Integer Sort record. Class B problems are larger in size than Class A.

"Sorting data taxes a computer's memory bandwidth. We regard the MTA-4's sorting performance as a key indicator of the MTA system's potential on a wide class of computationally difficult problems," said Koblenz.

In addition to the SDSC researchers, early users of the MTA system also include the Boeing Company, Caltech, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center (NERSC) and Sanders, a Lockheed Martin Company. The MTA system can be used for a wide variety of applications including molecular modeling, aircraft design, defense programs, visualization and database management.

About Tera Computer Company 

Tera Computer Company designs, builds and sells high performance general-purpose parallel computer systems. Tera believes its Multithreaded Architecture system represents the next wave in supercomputer technology because of its unique ability to provide high performance, broad applicability and ease of programming in a single system. For more information about Tera and its MTA systems, contact Tera at 411 First Avenue South, Suite 600, Seattle, WA 98104-2860. Phone: [phone]. Fax: [phone]. E-mail: [e-mail], or http://www.tera.com.