Business Notes SUPERCOMPUTERS

With 58% of the world market, Cray Research is indisputably the supercompany in the design and manufacture of supercomputers -- those ultrafast number crunchers that can do everything from designing jumbo jets to forecasting the < weather. But the company fell behind schedule last year in its drive to bring out a new generation of machines that would have eight central processors instead of four. In the meantime, Cray's main American supercomputer rival, ETA, this year unveiled machines with up to eight processors.

Cray did not trail for long, however. Last week the company introduced the much ballyhooed Y-MP model. Though it is difficult to compare peak computer speeds accurately, the new Cray, which can perform as many as 4 billion calculations per second, is probably at least as fast as any other machine on the market.