Cray

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. As of June 2025^[update], Cray supercomputer systems held the top three spots in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

In 1972, the company was founded by computer designer Seymour Cray as Cray Research, Inc., and it continues to manufacture parts in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where Cray was born and raised. After being acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996, the modern company was formed after being purchased in 2000 by Tera Computer Company, which adopted the name Cray Inc. In 2019, the company was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion.

In 1950, Seymour Cray began working in the computing field when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There, he helped to create the ERA 1103. ERA eventually became part of UNIVAC, and began to be phased out.

In 1960, he left the company, a few years after former ERA employees set up Control Data Corporation (CDC). He initially worked out of the CDC headquarters in Minneapolis. He eventually set up a lab in his hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Cray had a string of successes at CDC, including the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600.

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. 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. 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) semiconductors in computing. However, the changing political climate (collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War) 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 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, Cray C90 and Cray T90 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, 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 the Cray Time Sharing System operating system, developed at United States Department of Energy national laboratories (LANL/LLNL), before joining the broader trend toward adoption of Unixes. Today, Cray OS is a specialized version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

A series of massively parallel computers from Thinking Machines Corporation, Kendall Square Research, Intel, nCUBE, MasPar and Meiko Scientific 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 Alpha-based Cray T3D and Cray T3E series, which left Cray as the only remaining supercomputer vendor in the market besides NEC's SX architecture by 2000.