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 ...

, 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 instructio ...

manufacturer headquartered in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region ...

. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Cray manufactures its products in part in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where its founder, Seymour Cray, was born and raised. The company also has offices in Bloomington, Minnesota (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 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 began working in the computing field in 1950 when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in

Saint Paul, Minnesota Saint Paul (abbreviated St. Paul) is the capital of the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of Ramsey County. Situated on high bluffs overlooking a bend in the Mississippi River, Saint Paul is a regional business hub and the center ...

. There, he helped to create the ERA 1103. ERA eventually became part of UNIVAC, and began to be phased out. He left the company in 1960, a few years after former ERA employees set up Control Data Corporation (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 Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, about 85 miles to the east. Cray had a string of successes at CDC, including the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600.

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 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 origin ...

. The company's first product, the Cray-1 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, though it ended up being only marginally faster than the Cray X-MP, 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 technology lab for the Cray-2 in Boulder, Colorado, 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, where he worked on the Cray-3 project—the first attempt at major use of gallium arsenide (GaAs)

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way ...

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 republi ...

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 t ...

) 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 debto ...

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 and the Cray X-MP. 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 tec ...

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 architecture. Compared to the Y-MP, the C90 processor had a dual vector pipeline ...

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 (

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 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, ...

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 th ...

computers from Thinking Machines Corporation, Kendall Square Research,

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 ser ...

, nCUBE, MasPar 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 ...

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, 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 un ...

Alpha-based Cray T3D 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 fu ...

series, which left Cray as the only remaining supercomputer vendor in the market besides NEC's SX architecture 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 mainframes. This perception extended to countries as well: to boost the perception of exclusivity, Cray Research's marketing department had promotional neckties 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 po ...

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 minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines were based on the ...

series, as well as a number of small-scale parallel machines from companies like Pyramid Technology and Alliant Computer Systems were particularly popular. One such vendor was

, whose S-1 machine was an air-cooled CMOS implementation of the X-MP processor. Cray purchased Supertek in 1990 and sold the S-1 as the Cray XMS, 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) 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 The Cray J90 series (code-named '' Jedi'' during development) was an air-cooled vector processor supercomputer first sold by Cray Research in 1994. The J90 evolved from the Cray Y-MP EL minisupercomputer, and is compatible with Y-MP software, ru ...

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 Rob ...

, another minisuper vendor that had moved into the file server 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 develope ...

-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 operating system from Sun Microsystems. 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 Robert ...

) to sell this system as the Cray S-MP, 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 when it went into Chapter 11 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 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 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 ...

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 ...

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 lin ...

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 Tera Computer Company, 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. This was not a commercial success and shipped to only two customers. Cray Inc. also unsuccessfully badged the NEC SX-6 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 combined architecture vector processor /

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 States ...

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

. 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 Cray X1 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 range of entry-level supercomputers which use dual-core

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A ...

Advanced Micro Devices Opteron

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, a ...

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, whi ...

. This system was previously known as the OctigaBay 12K before Cray's acquisition of that company. The XD1 provided one Xilinx Virtex II Pro field-programmable gate array ( FPGA) with each node of four Opteron processors. The FPGAs could be configured to embody various digital hardware designs and could augment the processing or input/output capabilities of the Opteron processors. Furthermore, each FPGA contains a pair of PowerPC 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. 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, introduced in 2006 added support for DDR2 memory, newer dual-core and future quad-core Opteron 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 American businessman and was CEO of Cray. Education Ungaro received his undergraduate degree from Washington State University in 1991. Career After college Ungaro joined IBM, where he became vice president for ...

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, 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 FPGA 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 system, launched in September the same year. This was a deskside blade server 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 ar ...

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, Washi ...

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 computin ...

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 ...

installed. By 2009, the largest computer system Cray had delivered was the Cray XT5 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 ...

at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. This system, with over 224,000 processing cores, was dubbed '' Jaguar'' 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 world ...

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 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 processors 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, 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 processors. In October 2012 Cray announced the Cray XK7 which supports the NVIDIA Kepler GPGPU and announced that the ORNL Jaguar system would be upgraded to an XK7 (renamed ''

Titan Titan most often refers to: * Titan (moon), the largest moon of Saturn * Titans, a race of deities in Greek mythology Titan or Titans may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Fictional entities Fictional locations * Titan in fiction, fictiona ...

'') 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 supercompute ...

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

, 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 parallel programming standard organization. However, in 2019 Cray announced that it was deprecating OpenACC, and will support OpenMP. 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. Appro was a developer of supercomputing supporting High Performance Computing (HPC) markets focused on medium- to large-scale deployments. Appro was based in Milpitas, California with a computing center in Houston, Texas, and a manufacturing a ...

, 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 List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

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,

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 Bot ...

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

inaugurated the nation’s newest weather and climate supercomputers, two HPE Cray supercomputers installed and operated by General Dynamics (GDIT). Each supercomputer operates at 12.1 petaflops.

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