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Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington.[1] It also manufactures and sells systems for data storage, data management and data analytics.

Cray has a manufacturing in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and offices in St. Paul, Minnesota (the site of its original headquarters under founder Seymour Cray), and numerous other sales, service, engineering and R&D locations around the world. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the Top500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The number of Cray systems on the list varies from year to year.

Company history

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

Cray Inc. was founded as Cray Research, Inc., in 1972 by Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray set up research and development facilities for Cray Research in Chippewa Falls and business headquarters in Minneapolis. The company's first product, the Cray-1 supercomputer, was a major success because it was faster than all other computers at the time. The first system was sold within a month, to Los Alamos National Laboratory, for US$8.8 million. Seymour Cray left Cray Research in [YEAR] and moved to Colorado, where he started Cray Laboratories (closed in 1982), Cray Computer Corporation (closed in 1995) and SRC Computers, Inc., which still exists.

Meanwhile, Cray Research Inc. pioneered the multiprocessor supercomputer when it introduced the Cray X-MP in 1982. Several years later the company was the first to break the gigaflops speed barrier with the Cray Y-MP.

In the 1980s, a series of massively parallel computers from Thinking Machines, Kendall Square Research, Intel Supercomputing Systems Division, nCUBE, MasPar and Meiko Scientific took over the high performance computing 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 DEC Alpha-based Cray T3D and Cray T3E series, which left Cray as the only remaining supercomputer vendor in the market besides NEC by 2000.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, new vendors introduced small supercomputers, known as minisupercomputers (as opposed to superminis). These systems out-competed low-end Cray systems in the market. Cray Research purchased two of these companies – Supertek in 1990 and Floating Point Systems in 1991 — and set up Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (later the Business Systems Division) to sell minisupercomputers. In spite of these systems 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 their existing market niche.

Silicon Graphics: 1996 to 2000

In 1996 Cray Research merged with Silicon Graphics (SGI). At the time the industry was highly critical of the move, noting that there was little overlap between the two companies, either in markets or technology. SGI sold the Superservers business to Sun, but it used several Cray technologies in an attempt to move from the graphics workstation market into supercomputing. Sadly, Seymour Cray died in that year as a result of a traffic accident.

In 1999 SGI bundled the Cray assets into a separate business unit, and in 2000 it sold the unit to Tera Computer Company. Tera Computer Company then renamed itself Cray Inc.

Cray Inc.: 2000 to 2011

The early 2000s saw a new burst of innovation and strategy at Cray, including the production of the world’s first supercomputer to exceed 1 petaflops performance and the announcement of its ‘adaptive supercomputing’ vision.

The company’s first new system as Cray Inc. was the Cray X1 combined architecture vector / MPP supercomputer, previously known as the SV2, introduced in 2002. That year, Isothermal Systems Research sued Cray for patent infringement. The suit claimed that Cray used ISR's patented technology in the development of the Cray X1.[6] The lawsuit was settled in 2003.[7]

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 included an innovative new design for network interconnects, which was dubbed SeaStar and was destined to be the centerpiece of succeeding innovations by Cray.

In 2006, Cray announced a vision of its products dubbed 'adaptive supercomputing'.[14] Cray CTO Steve Scott was quoted as saying, “Adaptive supercomputing is necessary to support the future needs of HPC users as their need for higher performance on more complex applications outpaces Moore's Law. The Cray motto is: adapt the system to the application – not the application to the system” [March 2006]. The first generation of such systems, dubbed the Rainier Project, used a common interconnect network (SeaStar2), programming environment, cabinet design, and I/O subsystem.

In April 2008, Cray and Intel announced they would collaborate on future supercomputer systems. By 2009, the largest computer system Cray had delivered was the XT5 system at National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.[15] This system, with over 224,000 processing cores, was dubbed Jaguar and was the fastest computer in the world – and the first to exceed a sustained performance of 1 petaflops on a 64-bit scientific application – as measured by the LINPACK benchmark[16] at the speed of 1.75 petaflops[17] until it was surpassed by the Tianhe-1A in October 2010.

The early 2000s also saw the birth of the Chapel (Cascade High Productivity Language), a programming language for parallel computing that can run on systems ranging from supercomputers to laptops. Cray leads the development of Chapel in collaboration with the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS).

2010 to present: Expansion into data storage and analytics

In addition to the introduction of new supercomputing systems, the 2010s have seen Cray enter the data storage and data analytics markets. In 2010 Cray introduced the XE6 supercomputer, which had at its core Cray’s new Gemini system interconnect. This new interconnect included a true global-address space that represented a return to the T3E feature set that had been so successful with Cray Research.

Cray introduced a hybrid supercomputer, the Cray XK6, in 2011. The system combined the Gemini interconnect, AMD's multi-core scalar processors, and NVIDIA's Tesla GPGPU processors. The same year, Cray was awarded the US $188M “Blue Waters” contract with the University of Illinois, after IBM had pulled out of the delivery.[20] 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.

Cray entered the high performance data storage business in 2011 with the introduction of the Sonexion 1300 data storage system. This product used modular technology and a Lustre file system. Then in 2012 the company also expanded into the data analytics market when it created a “big data” division called YarcData and introduced the Urika data analytics appliance. The name YarcData was retired in 2014, but Cray continued to offer its data analytics products.

In 2012 Cray announced the Cray XK7, which supported the NVIDIA Kepler GPGPU, and announced that the “Jaguar” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory would be upgraded to an XK7. Renamed “Titan,” that system was and capable of over 20 petaflops. Titan was the world's fastest supercomputer as measured by the LINPACK benchmark[19] until the introduction of the Tianhe-2 in 2013, which is substantially faster.

In 2012 and 2013, Cray Inc. completed several corporate transactions. It sold its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel Corporation for $140 million USD,[21][22] and it acquired Appro International, Inc., a California-based privately held developer of advanced scalable supercomputing solutions.[23] In 2013 Cray acquired Gnodal Ltd. Europe.[24][25] Cray president and CEO Peter Ungaro said the acquisition would “expand our R&D efforts in Europe.”

Cray Inc. leadership

Michael P. Haydock – president and chief executive officer (2001 – 2002)

James E. Rottsalk, chairman of the board and chief executive officer (2002 – 2005)

Peter Ungaro, president and chief executive officer (2005 – present)