Cray Unveils a Much Cheaper Supercomputer : Technology: The U.S. firm hopes to gain on its Japanese rivals with new products and a research lab’s favorable performance test results.

Cray Research, the American supercomputer firm battling against deeper-pocketed Japanese rivals, announced Monday new and future products and new performance tests that suggest it could soon be back in the lead in the supercomputer race.

Cray pushed into the lower end of the supercomputer market by introducing the Y-MP8, a supercomputer that, starting at $300,000, is a third cheaper than its predecessor but just as fast.

The company also released the results of a performance test by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that gave high marks to Cray’s product line.

The new comparison tests showed the Y-MP8 besting its Japanese competitors in many key software tests. In the same tests, the C-90, a high-end computer Cray said it would unveil later this year, averaged four to five times the speed of NEC Corp.’s top machine and six times that of Fujitsu’s best machine.

“We are going to stomp on NEC,” said Carl Diem, vice president of marketing support for Minneapolis-based Cray.

The Los Alamos tests could be an important marketing tool for Cray. The company has been embarrassed by other benchmark comparisons published in the United States recently in which NEC supercomputers left Cray in the dust.

While NEC’s latest computer may outperform Cray’s next computer in some measures of raw speed, such as flops (floating operations per second), Diem says the numbers are “designed for the newspaper” and have little relevance to performance in running actual applications.

He noted that the Y-MP8, which has one-tenth the speed of NEC’s top machine measured in flops, ran many software applications at higher speed because it was designed to handle a broader variety of tasks.

One critical Cray advantage continues to be its ability to put more processors in a single machine than its Japanese competition. While the Cray C-90’s processors--the chips that act as the computer’s brains--performed slightly better than NEC on the Los Alamos tests, as a system the Cray is expected to do far better because it will be able to take 16 processors against NEC’s four.

NEC could not be reached for comment.

Cray also said it had begun work on a massively parallel system in which hundreds or even thousands of processors would work together. Although the massively parallel machine business has long been limited to such niche companies as Thinking Machines, more conventional companies have recently announced that they are looking at the technology.

“That architectural technique has come of age and has to be part of any future programs,” said John A. Rollwagen, Cray’s chief executive.