Tera MTA Four-Processor System Validates MTA Architecture.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 11, 1999--

TERA MTA FOUR-PROCESSOR SYSTEM VALIDATES MTA ARCHITECTURE

New Promise for Difficult Supercomputer Applications:

From Engineering to the Internet to New Science,

a Multi-Billion Dollar Market

Tera Computer Company (Nasdaq:TERA), a Seattle-based high-performance computer company, today announced that early results on its four-processor multithreaded (MTA-4) system clearly show the performance benefits of MTA over other current high-performance computer systems.

These results confirm that Tera's revolutionary design will lead to a breakthrough in performance on key industrial application codes, allowing companies to solve some of the world's most complex engineering problems, such as simulating car crashes and managing oil and gas reservoirs. In contrast to today's standard "monothreaded" microprocessors for supercomputers, Tera's innovative "multithreaded" processors use up to 128 virtual processors that utilize substantially more of a computer's processing power and tolerate memory latency, a barrier to performance on today's microprocessors.

Tera MTA-4 Shows Scalability and Shatters Data Sorting Record by 25%

The NASA NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB Version 2) were among the first tests to be run on Tera's MTA-4 system. These benchmarks are widely used to compare the performance of competing high-performance computer systems and provide a strong indication of how well any particular computer is expected to perform on problems in the real world. In line with Tera's expectations, the MTA-4 system demonstrated proof-of-concept on the company's main performance claims: scalability, processing power and ease of programming.

Tera's MTA-4 met the company's expectations for scaling application results when running the NPB benchmark kernels and demonstrated high parallel performance. Unlike traditional high-performance computers, the MTA scaled well on all five kernels, providing increased performance proportionate to the number of processors added.

The MTA-4 set a new world record on one of the five: Integer Sort "IS", which tests a computer's ability to scale a difficult data sorting problem and places extraordinary stress on its memory system. The Tera system is designed to supply very high memory bandwidth, which allowed the four-processor MTA to exceed the best recorded time set on a 256-processor IBM SP2 system. The Tera MTA outperformed the previous record by more than 25 percent, meaning that a user could sort about 100 million additional items in the time it took for the IBM system to complete this task.

Sorting large amounts of data quickly is crucial to a number of mission-critical industrial applications including structural analysis, decision support and high-resolution graphics. The increasingly heavy interactive query workload of the Internet requires extensive sorting capabilities, particularly for interaction with databases that reside on the server. In another example, sorting can be critical for automotive structural engineers during the time-consuming pre-simulation phase, when they are preparing to analyze voluminous amounts of information from large engineering databases.

MTA-4 Six to Twelve Times Faster On Sparse Matrix Multiplication

The four-processor Tera system also topped the reported performance of other high-performance computer systems configured with 24, 50 or even more processors on Conjugate Gradient "CG," a benchmark that typifies a broad range of highly complex engineering problems. Conjugate Gradient tests a computer's ability to multiply a sparse matrix and a dense vector, an important computation technique used in industrial simulation for the design of cars and airplanes. Such techniques can be used to simultaneously model multiple elements, including crash-worthiness and comfort factors, such as the noise, vibration and feeling of harmony while driving an automobile.

The MTA-4's strong performance on "IS" and "CG," the two most computationally difficult tests in the set of five kernels, provides the most compelling evidence to date that the MTA will excel in other highly memory intensive applications, such as the simulation of car crashes, bridges under stress from earthquakes, airplanes landing with flaps up, and the rendering of highly realistic computer animations. A handful of complex industrial software applications dominate the multi-billion dollar market for high-performance computers. Tera is already working with software vendors to demonstrate performance on these key applications.

"Already, the performance differences on key industrial applications typified by 'IS' and 'CG' are exciting to industrial users of today's vector supercomputers," said Jim Rottsolk, Tera's president and CEO. "And, the more complex the problem, the greater we think the performance advantages of the Tera MTA systems will be. We expect our results will continue to scale proportionally on the larger systems we will be building. An MTA-8 should run almost twice as fast as an MTA-4 on these benchmarks, and additional performance records will be broken."

Analysis of the Benchmarks

"We believe these results illustrate the strength and potential of both the software and hardware of Tera's MTA design," said Brian Koblenz, Tera's vice president of software. "The benefits of MTA become most apparent in the most computationally difficult problems, such as 'IS' and 'CG', where the benchmarks require high memory bandwidth and exhibit irregular data access patterns. This is good news for engineers working on complex industrial applications, such as automotive engineering, seismic analysis and petroleum reservoir studies."

"Even more impressive than MTA performance is how easily that performance is achieved," said Koblenz. "For high-performance computer users, reprogramming software when adding processors or transferring programs from existing machines or servers can be a slow and frustrating experience. Given that software often costs more than hardware, the automatic optimization features and ease-of-use of Tera's software should be strong points of preference for MTA systems," said Koblenz.

Many competing microprocessor systems, such as clusters of SGI Origin 2000 and IBM SP systems, are programmed using time-consuming message passing techniques to run the "IS" and "CG" codes in parallel. In contrast, Tera is able to take sequential code and automatically convert it into a parallel program using Tera's very strong compiler technology.

"Given these advantages, Tera MTA is well positioned to move into many applications, including markets currently served by the SGI T90 and NEC SX4," said Rottsolk. "This year, our goal is to install this very high performance computing capability in settings that will allow supercomputer users to achieve significantly higher performance on their most important applications."

For more information on the NASA NAS PB, see: http://science.nas.nasa.gov/Software/NPB/

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 visit http://www.tera.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding, among other things, Tera's plans to field a very high performance computing capability that will allow existing supercomputer users to run their most important applications with higher performance and the ability of the MTA multiprocessor to scale application codes. There are certain factors that could cause Tera's execution plans to differ materially from those anticipated by the statements above. Among such factors are risks associated with building larger MTA systems, necessary modifications to software and hardware systems, timely availability of commercially acceptable components from third party suppliers and availability of adequate financial resources. For a discussion of such risks, and other risks that could affect Tera's future performance, please see "Risk Factors" in Tera's most recent SEC Annual Report on Form 10-K\A.