Cray Inc., a subsidiary of

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...

, is an American

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

manufacturer headquartered in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Cray manufactures its products in part in

Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin Chippewa Falls is a city located on the Chippewa River in Chippewa County in the northwestern part of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 14,778 in the 2021 census. Incorporated as a city in 1869, it is the county seat of Chippewa Cou ...

, where its founder,

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996
) was an American

Bloomington, Minnesota Bloomington is a suburban city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, on the north bank of the Minnesota River, above its confluence with the Mississippi River, south of downtown Minneapolis. As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 89,987, ma ...

(which have been converted to Hewlett Packard Enterprise offices), and numerous other sales, service, engineering, and R&D locations around the world. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray later formed Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995. Cray Research was acquired by

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

(SGI) in 1996. Cray Inc. was formed in 2000 when

Tera Computer Company The Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of high-performance computing software and hardware, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C. and moved 1988 to Seattle, Washington by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith. The company's first supercomputer prod ...

purchased the Cray Research Inc. business from SGI and adopted the name of its acquisition. The company was acquired by

in 2019 for $1.3 billion.

History

Background: 1950–1972

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996
) was an American

Engineering Research Associates Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. ERA became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were ev ...

(ERA) in

Saint Paul, Minnesota Saint Paul (abbreviated St. Paul) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital of the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of Ramsey County, Minnesota, Ramsey County. Situated on high bluffs overlooking a bend in the Mississip ...

. There, he helped to create the

ERA 1103 The UNIVAC 1103 or ERA 1103, a successor to the UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed by Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington Rand corporation in October 1953. It was the first computer for which Seymour Cray was credi ...

. ERA eventually became part of

UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...

, and began to be phased out. He left the company in 1960, a few years after former ERA employees set up

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...

(CDC). He initially worked out of the CDC headquarters in Minneapolis, but grew upset by constant interruptions by managers. He eventually set up a lab in his hometown of

, about 85 miles to the east. Cray had a string of successes at CDC, including the

CDC 6600 The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM ...

and

CDC 7600 The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz (27.5 ns clock cycle) and had a 65 Kword primary memory (with a 6 ...

Cray Research Inc. and Cray Computer Corporation: 1972–1996

When CDC ran into financial difficulties in the late 1960s, development funds for Cray's follow-on

CDC 8600 The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while he worked for Control Data Corporation. As the natural successor to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the f ...

became scarce. When he was told the project would have to be put "on hold" in 1972, Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research, Inc. Copying the previous arrangement, Cray kept the research and development facilities in Chippewa Falls, and put the business headquarters in

Minneapolis Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

. The company's first product, the

Cray-1 The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...

supercomputer, was a major success because it was significantly faster than all other computers at the time. The first system was sold within a month for $8.8 million. Seymour Cray continued working, this time on the

Cray-2 The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. It was, i ...

, though it ended up being only marginally faster than the

Cray X-MP The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance ...

, developed by another team at the company. Cray soon left the CEO position to become an independent contractor. He started a new

Very Large Scale Integration Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) c ...

technology lab for the Cray-2 in

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...

, Cray Laboratories, in 1979, which closed in 1982; undaunted, Cray later headed a similar spin-off in 1989, Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) in

Colorado Springs, Colorado Colorado Springs is a home rule municipality in, and the county seat of, El Paso County, Colorado, United States. It is the largest city in El Paso County, with a population of 478,961 at the 2020 United States Census, a 15.02% increase since ...

, where he worked on the

Cray-3 The Cray-3 was a vector supercomputer, Seymour Cray's designated successor to the Cray-2. The system was one of the first major applications of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing, using hundreds of custom built ICs packed into ...

project—the first attempt at major use of

gallium arsenide Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a Zincblende (crystal structure), zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monoli ...

(GaAs)

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...

s in computing. However, the changing political climate (collapse of the

Warsaw Pact The Warsaw Pact (WP) or Treaty of Warsaw, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republic ...

and the end of the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

) resulted in poor sales prospects. Ultimately, only one Cray-3 was delivered, and a number of follow-on designs were never completed. The company filed for

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...

in 1995. CCC's remains then became Cray's final corporation, SRC Computers, Inc. Cray Research continued development along a separate line of computers, originally with lead designer

Steve Chen Steve Chen (; born August 25, 1978) is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur who is one of the co-founders and previous chief technology officer of the video-sharing website YouTube. After having co-founded the company AVOS Systems, Inc. a ...

and the

. After Chen's departure, the

Cray Y-MP The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL tech ...

Cray C90 The Cray C90 series (initially named the Y-MP C90) was a vector processor supercomputer launched by Cray Research in 1991. The C90 was a development of the Cray Y-MP The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the su ...

and

Cray T90 The Cray T90 series (code-named ''Triton'' during development) was the last of a line of vector processing supercomputers manufactured by Cray Research, Inc, superseding the Cray C90 series. The first machines were shipped in 1995, and featured a ...

were developed on the original Cray-1 architecture but achieved much greater performance via multiple additional processors, faster clocks, and wider vector pipes. The uncertainty of the Cray-2 project gave rise to a number of Cray-object-code compatible "Crayette" firms: Scientific Computer Systems (SCS), American Supercomputer,

Supertek Supertek Computers Inc. was a computer company founded in Santa Clara, California in 1985 by Mike Fung, an ex-Hewlett-Packard project manager, with the aim of designing and selling low-cost minisupercomputers compatible with those from Cray Resea ...

, and perhaps one other firm. These firms did not intend to compete against Cray and therefore attempted less expensive, slower CMOS versions of the X-MP with the release of the COS operating system (SCS) and the CFT Fortran compiler; they also considered

United States Department of Energy national laboratories The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers is a system of facilities and laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for scientific and technological research. Sixteen of the sev ...

(

LANL Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

) developed

Cray Time Sharing System The Cray Time Sharing System, also known in the Cray user community as CTSS, was developed as an operating system for the Cray-1 or Cray X-MP line of supercomputers. CTSS was developed by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL now LANL) in con ...

operating system as well before joining the broader trend toward adoption of

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

es.

A series of

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...

computers from

Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and Danny Hillis, W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the ...

Kendall Square Research Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt I ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

nCUBE nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for machi ...

MasPar MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California. History While Kalb was the vice-president of the division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) t ...

and

Meiko Scientific Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer b ...

took over the 1980s high performance market. At first, Cray Research denigrated such approaches by complaining that developing software to effectively use the machines was difficult – a true complaint in the era of the

ILLIAC IV The ILLIAC IV was the first massively parallel computer. The system was originally designed to have 256 64-bit floating point units (FPUs) and four central processing units (CPUs) able to process 1 billion operations per second. Due to budget con ...

, but becoming less so each day. Cray eventually realized that the approach was likely the only way forward and started a five-year project to capture the lead in this area: the plan's result was the

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

-based

Cray T3D The T3D (''Torus, 3-Dimensional'') was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel supercomputer architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of another company's microprocessor. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 204 ...

and

Cray T3E The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in late November 1995. The first T3E was installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996. Like the previous Cray T3D, it was a ful ...

series, which left Cray as the only remaining supercomputer vendor in the market besides NEC's

SX architecture SX, Sx, sx, or Sx may refer to: In medicine * Sx, symptoms * Sx, surgery In music * SX (band), a Belgian indie pop band * S-X (producer), a British producer and singer In technology: * .sx, the country code top-level domain for Sint Maarten * ...

by 2000. Most sites with a Cray installation were considered members of the "exclusive club" of Cray operators. Cray computers were considered quite prestigious because Crays were extremely expensive machines, and the number of units sold was small compared to ordinary

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

s. This perception extended to countries as well: to boost the perception of exclusivity, Cray Research's marketing department had promotional

necktie A necktie, or simply a tie, is a piece of cloth worn for decorative purposes around the neck, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat, and often draped down the chest. Variants include the ascot, bow, bolo, zipper tie, cra ...

s made with a mosaic of tiny national flags illustrating the "club of Cray-operating countries". New vendors introduced small supercomputers, known as

minisupercomputer Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s, characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing. As scientific computing using vector processors became more pop ...

s (as opposed to superminis) during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which out-competed low-end Cray machines in the market. The

Convex Computer Convex Computer Corporation was a company that developed, manufactured and marketed Vector processor, vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines wer ...

series, as well as a number of small-scale parallel machines from companies like

Pyramid Technology Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California They also became the second company to s ...

and

Alliant Computer Systems Alliant Computer Systems Corporation was a computer company that designed and manufactured parallel computing systems. Together with Pyramid Technology and Sequent Computer Systems, Alliant's machines pioneered the symmetric multiprocessing market ...

were particularly popular. One such vendor was

, whose S-1 machine was an air-cooled

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...

implementation of the X-MP processor. Cray purchased Supertek in 1990 and sold the S-1 as the

Cray XMS The Cray XMS was a vector processor minisupercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1990 to 1991. The XMS was originally designed by Supertek Computers Inc. as the Supertek S-1, intended to be a low-cost air-cooled clone of the Cray X-MP with a CMOS r ...

, but the machine proved problematic; meanwhile, the not-yet-completed S-2, a Y-MP clone, was later offered as the

(later becoming the

Cray EL90 The Cray EL90 series was an air-cooled vector processor supercomputer first sold by Cray Research in 1993. The EL90 series evolved from the Cray Y-MP EL minisupercomputer, and is compatible with Y-MP software, running the same UNICOS operating sys ...

) which started to sell in reasonable numbers in 1991–92—to mostly smaller companies, notably in the oil exploration business. This line evolved into the Cray J90 and eventually the

Cray SV1 The Cray SV1 is a vector processor supercomputer from the Cray Research division of Silicon Graphics introduced in 1998. The SV1 has since been succeeded by the Cray X1 and X1E vector supercomputers. Like its predecessor, the Cray J90, the SV1 used ...

in 1998. In December 1991, Cray purchased some of the assets of

Floating Point Systems Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of attached array processors and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prince, Frank Bouton and Robe ...

, another minisuper vendor that had moved into the

file server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...

market with its

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

-based Model 500 line. These

symmetric multiprocessing Symmetric multiprocessing or shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware and software architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single, shared main memory, have full access to all ...

machines scaled up to 64 processors and ran a modified version of the

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

operating system from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

. Cray set up Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (later the

Cray Business Systems Division Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of attached array processors and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prince, Frank Bouton and Rober ...

) to sell this system as the

Cray S-MP The Cray S-MP was a multiprocessor server computer sold by Cray Research from 1992 to 1993. It was based on the Sun SPARC microprocessor architecture and could be configured with up to eight 66 MHz BIT B5000 processors. Optionally, a Cray APP matr ...

, later replacing it with the

Cray CS6400 The Cray Superserver 6400, or CS6400, is a discontinued multiprocessor server computer system produced by Cray Research Superservers, Inc., a subsidiary of Cray Research, and launched in 1993. The CS6400 was also sold as the Amdahl SPARCsummit 6400 ...

. In spite of these machines being some of the most powerful available when applied to appropriate workloads, Cray was never very successful in this market, possibly due to it being so foreign to its existing market niche. CCC was building the

Cray-3/SSS The Cray-3/SSS (Super Scalable System) was a pioneering massively parallel supercomputer project that bonded a two-processor Cray-3 to a new SIMD processing unit based entirely in the computer's main memory.http://www.secinfo.com/dsVQy.a1u4.htm CC ...

when it went into

Chapter 11 Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, wheth ...

bankruptcy in March 1995.

Silicon Graphics ownership: 1996–2000

Cray Research was acquired by

(SGI) for $740 million in February 1996. In May 1996, SGI sold the Superservers business to Sun. Sun then turned the UltraSPARC-based ''Starfire'' project then under development into the extremely successful

Sun Enterprise 10000 Sun Enterprise is a range of UNIX server computers produced by Sun Microsystems from 1996 to 2001. The line was launched as the Sun Ultra Enterprise series; the ''Ultra'' prefix was dropped around 1998. These systems are based on the 64-bit Ultr ...

range of servers. SGI used several Cray technologies in its attempt to move from the graphics workstation market into supercomputing. Key among these was the use of the Cray-developed HIPPI

computer bus In computer architecture, a bus (shortened form of the Latin '' omnibus'', and historically also called data highway or databus) is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This ex ...

and details of the interconnects used in the T3 series. SGI's long-term strategy was to merge its high-end server line with Cray's product lines in two phases, code-named ''SN1'' and ''SN2'' (SN standing for "Scalable Node"). The SN1 was intended to replace the T3E and

SGI Origin 2000 The SGI Origin 2000 is a family of mid-range and high-end server computers developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics (SGI). They were introduced in 1996 to succeed the SGI Challenge and POWER Challenge. At the time of introduction, these r ...

systems and later became the ''SN-MIPS'' or

SGI Origin 3000 The Origin 3000 and the Onyx 3000 is a family of mid-range and high-end computers developed and manufactured by SGI. The Origin 3000 is a server, and the Onyx 3000 is a visualization system. Both systems were introduced in July 2000 to succeed th ...

architecture. The SN2 was originally intended to unify all high-end/supercomputer product lines including the T90 into a single architecture. This goal was never achieved before SGI divested itself of the Cray business, and the SN2 name was later associated with the ''SN-IA'' or SGI

Altix Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics (and successor company Silicon Graphics International), based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/ IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers. History The line w ...

3000 architecture. In October 1996, Founder Seymour Cray died as a result of a traffic accident. Under SGI ownership, one new Cray model line, the

, was launched in 1998. This was a clustered SMP vector processor architecture, developed from J90 technology. On March 2, 2000, Cray was sold to

, which was renamed Cray Inc.

Post-Tera merger: 2000–2019

After the Tera merger, the Tera MTA system was relaunched as the

Cray MTA-2 The Cray MTA-2 is a shared-memory MIMD computer marketed by Cray Inc. It is an unusual design based on the Tera computer designed by Tera Computer Company. The original Tera computer (also known as the ''MTA'') turned out to be nearly unmanufact ...

. This was not a commercial success and shipped to only two customers. Cray Inc. also unsuccessfully badged the

NEC SX-6 The SX-6 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to eight vector processors, which share up to 64 GB of computer memo ...

supercomputer as the Cray SX-6 and acquired exclusive rights to sell the SX-6 in the US, Canada, and Mexico. In 2002, Cray Inc. announced its first new model, the

Cray X1 The Cray X1 is a non-uniform memory access, vector processor supercomputer manufactured and sold by Cray Inc. since 2003. The X1 is often described as the unification of the Cray T90, Cray SV1, and Cray T3E architectures into a single machine. The ...

combined architecture

vector processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ...

supercomputer. Previously known as the ''SV2'', the X1 is the end result of the earlier ''SN2'' concept originated during the SGI years. In May 2004, Cray was announced to be one of the partners in the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

's fastest-computer-in-the-world project to build a 50 tera

Flops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

machine for the

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and ...

. Cray was sued in 2002 by Isothermal Systems Research for patent infringement. The suit claimed that Cray used ISR's patented technology in the development of the Cray X1. The lawsuit was settled in 2003. As of November 2004, the

had a maximum measured performance of 5.9 teraflops, being the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world. Since then the X1 has been superseded by the X1E, with faster dual-core processors. On October 4, 2004, the company announced the

Cray XD1 The Cray XD1 was an entry-level supercomputer range, made by Cray Inc. The XD1 uses AMD Opteron 64-bit CPUs, and utilizes the Direct Connect Architecture over HyperTransport to remove the bottleneck at the PCI and contention at the memory. The ...

range of entry-level supercomputers which use dual-core

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit Integer (computer science), integers, memory addresses, or other Data (computing), data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing unit, CPUs and arithmetic logic unit, ALUs are those ...

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufact ...

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''SledgeHa ...

central processing unit A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

s running

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. This system was previously known as the OctigaBay 12K before Cray's acquisition of that company. The XD1 provided one

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the fi ...

Virtex II Pro field-programmable gate array (

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...

) with each node of four Opteron processors. The FPGAs could be configured to embody various

digital hardware Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals. Digital electronic circuits are usually ...

designs and could augment the processing or input/output capabilities of the Opteron processors. Furthermore, each FPGA contains a pair of

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

405 processors which can add to the already considerable power of a single node. The Cray XD1, although moderately successful, was eventually discontinued. In 2004, Cray completed the Red Storm system for

Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force Ba ...

. Red Storm was to become the jumping-off point for a string of successful products that eventually revitalized Cray in supercomputing. Red Storm had processors clustered in 96 unit cabinets, a theoretical maximum of 300 cabinets in a machine, and a design speed of 41.5 teraflops. Red Storm also included an innovative new design for network interconnects, which was dubbed SeaStar and destined to be the centerpiece of succeeding innovations by Cray. The Cray XT3 massively parallel supercomputer became a commercialized version of Red Storm, similar in many respects to the earlier T3E architecture, but, like the XD1, using AMD Opteron processors. The

Cray XT4 The Cray XT4 (codenamed ''Hood'' during development) is an updated version of the Cray XT3 supercomputer. It was released on November 18, 2006. It includes an updated version of the SeaStar interconnect router called SeaStar2, processor sockets ...

, introduced in 2006 added support for DDR2 memory, newer dual-core and future quad-core

processors and utilized a second generation SeaStar2 communication coprocessor. It also included an option for FPGA chips to be plugged directly into processor sockets, unlike the Cray XD1, which required a dedicated socket for the FPGA coprocessor. On August 8, 2005,

Peter Ungaro Peter J. Ungaro (born 1969) is an Americans, American businessman and was chief executive officer, CEO of Cray. Education Ungaro received his undergraduate degree from Washington State University in 1991. Career After college Ungaro joined IBM, ...

was appointed CEO. Ungaro had joined Cray in August 2003 as Vice President of Sales and Marketing and had been made Cray's President in March 2005. On November 13, 2006, Cray announced a new system, the

Cray XMT Cray XMT (''Cray eXtreme MultiThreading'', codenamed ''Eldorado'') is a scalable multithreaded shared memory supercomputer architecture by Cray, based on the third generation of the Tera MTA architecture, targeted at large graph problems (e.g ...

, based on the MTA series of machines. This system combined multi-threaded processors, as used on the original Tera systems, and the SeaStar2 interconnect used by the XT4. By reusing ASICs, boards, cabinets, and system software used by the comparatively higher volume XT4 product, the cost of making the very specialized MTA system could be reduced. A second generation of the XMT is scheduled for release in 2011, with the first system ordered by the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS). In 2006, Cray announced a vision of products dubbed ''Adaptive Supercomputing''. The first generation of such systems, dubbed the ''Rainier Project'', used a common interconnect network (SeaStar2), programming environment, cabinet design, and I/O subsystem. These systems included the existing XT4 and the XMT. The second generation, launched as the XT5h, allowed a system to combine compute elements of various types into a common system, sharing infrastructure. The XT5h combined Opteron, vector, multithreaded, and

compute processors in a single system. In April 2008, Cray and

announced they would collaborate on future supercomputer systems. This partnership produced the

Cray CX1 The Cray CX1 is a deskside High-performance computing, high-performance workstation designed by Cray, Cray Inc., based on the x86-64 processor architecture. It was launched on September 16, 2008, and was discontinued in early 2012. It comprises ...

system, launched in September the same year. This was a deskside

blade server A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, whil ...

system, comprising up to 16 dual- or quad-core Intel

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

processors, with either

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Windows HPC Server 2008 Windows HPC Server 2008, released by Microsoft on 22 September 2008, is the successor product to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Like WCCS, Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed for high-end applications that require high performance computing ...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

installed. By 2009, the largest computer system Cray had delivered was the

Cray XT5 The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer, launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which ...

system at

National Center for Computational Sciences The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with hel ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratories Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and ...

. This system, with over 224,000 processing cores, was dubbed ''

Jaguar The jaguar (''Panthera onca'') is a large cat species and the only living member of the genus '' Panthera'' native to the Americas. With a body length of up to and a weight of up to , it is the largest cat species in the Americas and the th ...

'' and was the fastest computer in the world as measured by the LINPACK benchmark at the speed of 1.75 petaflops until being surpassed by the

Tianhe-1A Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (, ; '' Sky River Number One'') is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the worl ...

in October 2010. It was the first system to exceed a sustained performance of 1 petaflops on a 64-bit scientific application. CraySC18

In May 2010, the

Cray XE6 The Cray XE6 (codename during development: ''Baker)'' made by Cray is an enhanced version of the Cray XT6 supercomputer, officially announced on 25 May 2010. The XE6 uses the same computer blade found in the XT6, with eight- or 12-core Opteron 61 ...

supercomputer was announced. The Cray XE6 system had at its core the new Gemini system interconnect. This new interconnect included a true global-address space and represented a return to the T3E feature set that had been so successful with Cray Research. This product was a successful follow-on to the XT3, XT4 and XT5 products. The first multi-cabinet XE6 system was shipped in July 2010. The next generation ''Cascade'' systems were designed make use of future multicore and/or

manycore processor Manycore processors are special kinds of multi-core processors designed for a high degree of parallel processing, containing numerous simpler, independent processor cores (from a few tens of cores to thousands or more). Manycore processors are us ...

s from vendors such as Intel and NVIDIA. Cascade was scheduled to be introduced in early 2013 and designed to use the next-generation network chip and follow-on to Gemini, code named ''Aries''. In early 2010, Cray also introduced the

Cray CX1000 The Cray CX1000 is a family of high-performance computers which is manufactured by Cray Inc., and consists of two individual groups of computer systems. The first group is intended for scale-up symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and consists of the ...

, a rack-mounted system with a choice of compute-based, GPU-based, or SMP-based chassis. The CX1 and CX1000 product lines were sold until late 2011. In 2011, Cray announced the Cray XK6 hybrid supercomputer. The Cray XK6 system, capable of scaling to 500,000 processors and 50 petaflops of peak performance, combines Cray's Gemini interconnect, AMD's multi-core scalar processors, and

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

's Tesla

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

processors. In October 2012 Cray announced the

Cray XK7 XK7 is a supercomputing platform, produced by Cray, launched on October 29, 2012. XK7 is the second platform from Cray to use a combination of central processing units ("CPUs") and graphical processing units ("GPUs") for computing; the hybrid ar ...

which supports the NVIDIA Kepler GPGPU and announced that the ORNL Jaguar system would be upgraded to an XK7 (renamed '' Titan'') and capable of over 20 petaflops. Titan was the world's fastest supercomputer as measured by the LINPACK benchmark until the introduction of the

Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86-petaflops supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ac ...

in 2013, which is substantially faster. In 2011 Cray also announced it had been awarded the $188 million

Blue Waters Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which auth ...

contract with the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

, after IBM had pulled out of the delivery. This system was delivered in 2012 and was the largest system to date, in terms of cabinets and general-purpose x86 processors, that Cray had ever delivered. In November 2011, the Cray Sonexion 1300 Data Storage System was introduced and signaled Cray's entry into the high performance storage business. This product used modular technology and a Lustre file system. In 2011, Cray launched the

OpenACC OpenACC (for ''open accelerators'') is a programming standard for parallel computing developed by Cray, CAPS, Nvidia and PGI. The standard is designed to simplify parallel programming of heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems. As in OpenMP, the programm ...

parallel programming standard organization. However, in 2019 Cray announced that it was deprecating

, and will support

OpenMP OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared-memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on many platforms, instruction-set architectures and operating syste ...

. In April 2012, Cray announced the sale of its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $140 million. On November 9, 2012, Cray announced the acquisition of Appro International, Inc., a California-based privately held developer of advanced scalable supercomputing solutions. Currently the #3 provider on the Top100 supercomputer list, Appro builds some of the world's most advanced high performance computing (HPC) cluster systems. In 2012, Cray opened a subsidiary in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise: 2019–present

On September 25, 2019,

(HPE) acquired the company for $1.3 billion. In October 2020, HPE was awarded the contract to build the pre-exascale EuroHPC computer

LUMI Lumi may refer to: Computing * Lumi (software), chemical analysis software * Lumi masking, a technique used by video compression software * LUMI, a supercomputer located in Finland Music * ''Lumi'' (album), a 1987 album by Edward Vesala ...

, in

Kajaani Kajaani (; sv, Kajana) is the most populous town and the capital of the Kainuu Region of Finland. It is located southeast of Lake Oulu (Oulujärvi), which drains into the Gulf of Bothnia through the Oulu River (Oulujoki). As of , it had a pop ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

. The contract, worth €144.5 million, is for an HPE Cray EX system, with a theoretical maximum performance of 550

petaflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

. Once fully operational, LUMI will become one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. On June 28, 2022, the US

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditio ...

inaugurated the nation’s newest weather and climate supercomputers, two HPE Cray supercomputers installed and operated by

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded, aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales, and 5th largest in the Uni ...

(GDIT). Each supercomputer operates at 12.1

References

External links

*
Comprehensive site with details and history of machines, sales documents, Cray Channels magazine and FAQ notes

Cray Manuals Library @ Computing History

Cray Manuals at bitsavers.org

Historic Cray Research Marketing Materials at the Computer History Museum
* Cray headquarters is at coordinates {{Authority control 2019 mergers and acquisitions Manufacturing companies based in Seattle Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Computer companies established in 1972 American companies established in 1972 1995 initial public offerings Computer companies of the United States Computer hardware companies Silicon Graphics Hewlett-Packard acquisitions Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquisitions