Supertek Computers Inc. was a computer company founded in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...

in 1985 by Mike Fung, an ex- Hewlett-Packard project manager, with the aim of designing and selling low-cost

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 compatible with those from

Cray Research Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

. Its first product was the Supertek S-1, a compact, air-cooled, CMOS clone of the Cray X-MP

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 calle ...

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 ...

running the CTSS (Cray Time Sharing System)

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

, and later a version 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, ...

. This was launched in 1989. Only ten were sold before Supertek was acquired by Cray Research in 1990 and the S-1 was subsequently sold for a brief time by Cray 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 CM ...

. At the time of the acquisition the Supertek S-2, a clone of 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 ...

, was under development briefly named the Cray YMS, and this was eventually launched as the Cray Y-MP EL in 1992.

References

Parallel.ru: The History of the Development of Parallel Computing

Defunct computer companies based in California Cray Vector supercomputers Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Santa Clara, California Computer companies established in 1985 Companies disestablished in 1990 1985 establishments in California 1990 disestablishments in California Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area {{tech-company-stub