Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. Today's company was formed in 2000 by a merger of Tera Computer Company with Cray Research, then a unit of SGI. Cray Research was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Already a legend in his field by this time, Cray put his company on the map in 1976 with the release of the Cray-1 vector computer.

The Cray Research years

Seymour Cray began working in the computing field in 1950 when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There, he helped to create the ERA 1103, regarded as the first successful scientific computer. ERA eventually became part of Univac, and started to be phased out. He left the company in 1960, a few years after some former ERA employees set up Control Data Corporation (CDC). He eventually set up a lab at his home in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, about 85 miles to the east. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company, with research and development facilities in Chippewa Falls but with the business headquarters back in Minneapolis.

The Cray-1 was a major success when it was released, faster than all computers at the time except for the ILLIAC IV. The first system was sold within a month for US$88.8 million. Seymour Cray continued working, this time on the Cray-2, though in the end it only ended up being marginally faster than the Cray X-MP, developed by another team at the company.

He soon left the CEO position to become an independent contractor. The company had started a lab in Colorado during the 1980s, and this was spun off in 1989 as Cray Computer Corporation. Seymour Cray worked there on the Cray-3 project, the first attempt at major use of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing. However, due to technical and financial difficulties, the company quickly fell by the wayside, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 1995.

Cray Research merged with SGI in February 1996. SGI set up a separate Cray Research Business Unit in August 1999 in preparation for detachment. On March 2, 2000, the unit was sold to Tera Corporation. Tera Corporation was then renamed Cray Inc. when the deal closed on April 4, 2000.

Current status of Cray Inc.

As of 2004, the main product of the company is the Cray X1 combined architecture vector / MPP supercomputer. In May the same year, Cray was announced to be one of the partners in the U.S. Dept.of Energy's fastest-computer-in-the-world project to build a 50 teraflops machine for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. As of November 2004, the Cray X1 has a maximum measured performance of 5.9 teraflops, being the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world. The reigning kings-of-the-hill supercomputers as of the time being IBM's BlueGene/L DD2, which were measured at 70.7 teraflops and SGI's Altix Infiniband, which runs at 51.9 teraflops.

On 4 October 2004, the company announced the Cray XD1 range of supercomputers which will use 64-bit AMD Opteron CPUss running GNU/Linux. Cray is also completing the Red Storm system being built for Sandia National Laboratories having CPUs clustered in 96-processor cabinets, a theoretical maximum of 300 cabinets in a machine, and a design speed of 41.5 Tflops. While 2004 has not been a particularly good year for Cray due in part to reduced U.S. Government supercomputer spending, many analysts see this as temporary, and Cray, Inc. hopes to gain market share with the XD1.

Trivia

As the Cray computers were extremely expensive machines, they were sold in relatively low volumes (compared to ordinary mainframess). Thus, most sites with a Cray installation considered it quite prestigious to be a member of the "exclusive club" of Cray operators. This 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". Also, in at least one instance (a Cray X-MP sold to SINTEF/NTH in Norway), Cray delivered the machine equipped with the purchasing institution's national flag mounted on top of the main unit.

In the 1970s and 1980s, IBM and Cray competed to be the maker of the fastest computer on earth. Cray won everytime: a computer that would eventually break the world record set by a previous Cray was also a Cray.

Cray employees have sometimes been known as "Crayons."