London-- Hitachi Europe Ltd. has won the contract to supply Europe's most 
powerful supercomputer, which can perform more than 1 trillion calculations per 
second.  

This state-of-the-art computer, a top of the range SR8000, which will have a 
peak performance of over 2 TFLOPS(1) by 2002, is to be installed in the Leibniz 
Computer Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum - LRZ) in Munich. The LRZ is a 
department within the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the largest of the seven 
science academies in Germany. 

Scientists from across Germany will be able to use the SR8000 to process jobs 
several times larger and more complicated than were previously possible.  The 
SR8000 will be used by scientists to conduct research in: 
- physics and geophysics - for the simulation of high temperature 
 superconductors, melting processes and crystal growth and the propagation 
 of seismic waves 
- chemistry - for the determination of molecular structures 
- astronomy - for nuclear combustion in stars and for hydrodynamics and 
 radiation propagation in the stellar atmospheres 
- meteorology - for regional climate modeling 
- engineering sciences - for flow and structure simulation, aerodynamics of 
 cars and airplanes
- software engineering for parallel applications

The SR8000 is the latest in a long line of Hitachi supercomputers and was 
introduced to the market in December 1998. While twelve SR8000s have 
already successfully been installed in Japan, the LRZ contract represents the 
largest in Europe. 

In its final configuration, the SR8000 will have over 1 terabyte of main memory 
and a total disc capacity of 10 terabytes which will allow enormous quantities of 
data to be stored and accessed with large bandwidth.

LRZ chose the SR8000 for its ability to support two distinct supercomputing 
architectural paradigms - massively parallel processing and vector processing.  
As well as a user-friendly software environment, the SR8000 provides an easy 
upward migration path for applications from both vector and parallel processing 
origins. 

The system will consist of a high number of processing elements and due to its 
flexible partitioning capability will be well suited to multi-user environments. The 
processing elements may be grouped into nodes and assigned to individual 
users to run vector codes, or may be combined into secure partitions for 
vector/parallel or massively parallel processing applications. Each of the nine 
processors in a node has access to a common main memory.

Kazutoshi Gemma, General Manager, High Performance Computer Group, 
Hitachi Europe Ltd. commented, "We are delighted to have won this contract.  
Not only does this underline the leading capabilities of the SR8000, but it clearly 
illustrates Hitachi's growing presence in Europe."

Prof. Dr. Hegering, Director of LRZ said, "The innovative architecture of the 
SR8000 computer makes it exceptionally well suited to all vectorisable and 
parallelisable programs. Following a worldwide tender, the SR8000 was judged 
to have the greatest potential.  It meets all the LRZ benchmarks convincingly."

Notes to editors

Note(1)	1 TFLOPS = 1 trillion floating point computer operations per second.

About Hitachi Europe Ltd.
Hitachi Europe Ltd., is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., Japan.  It has 
operations throughout Europe, which provides sales, marketing, technical support and 
research & development.  For more information please visit Hitachi Europe's Web site 
at http://www.hitachi-eu.com.

Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global 
electronics companies, with fiscal 1998 (ended March 31, 1999) consolidated sales of 
7,977 billion yen ($65.9 billion*).  The company manufactures and markets a wide 
range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and 
power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., please visit 
Hitachi's Web site at http://www.hitachi.co.jp.
* At an exchange rate of 121 yen to the dollar.

About Leibniz-Rechenzentrum
The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) was founded in the mid 1960s as a computing 
centre for all the universities in the Munich area. In the late 1980s it became a state 
supercomputer centre for all Bavarian universities. For additional information, please 
see http:// www. Lrz.de/wir/


For further information, please contact:

Masao Takebayashi	/Jo MacGovern     or	Patrick Evans / Stephanie 
Barrett	
Hitachi Europe Ltd.				Citigate Dewe Rogerson
+44 1628 585000					+44 171 638 9571
mtake@hitachi-eu.com				patrick.evans@citigatedr.co.uk
joanna.macgovern@hitachi-eu.com			stephanie.barrett@citigatedr.co.uk