Stardent Computer, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations in the late 1980s. The company was formed in 1989 when Ardent Computer Corporation (formerly Dana Computer, Inc.) and Stellar Computer Inc. merged.

Both of the founding companies had formed in 1985, intending to address different market niches; Stellar concentrated on high-performance workstation type machines, while Ardent developed a custom vector processor that allowed it to compete with large supercomputers for graphics-related tasks. Ardent had considered a workstation entry of their own to compete with Stellar, but the merger ended the need for a second design.

The company was never able to compete successfully with larger vendors and its sales peaked at around $40 million in 1990. The company successfully sold off some of its technologies before being broken up completely in 1994.

Stellar Computer was founded in 1985 in Newton, Massachusetts, and headed by William Poduska, who had previously founded Prime Computer and Apollo Computer. This company aimed to produce a workstation system with enough performance to be a serious threat to the Ardent Titan, and at a lower price. Ardent responded by starting work on a new desktop system called Stiletto, which featured two MIPS R3000s (paired with two R3010 FPUs) and four i860s for graphics processing (the i860s replaced the vector units). Their first product was demonstrated in March 1988. An investment from Japanese company Mitsui and others was announced in June 1988, bringing the total capital raised to $48 million.

At almost the same time, in November 1985, Allen H. Michels and Matthew Sanders III co-founded Dana Computer, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California. The company sought to produce a desktop multiprocessing supercomputer dedicated to graphics that could support up to four processor units. Gordon Bell, who had been architect of the VAX computer, was VP of Engineering. Michels had considered working with Poduska, but founded Convergent Technologies instead, before Ardent.

Each processor unit consisted initially of a MIPS R2000 CPU, and later a R3000, connected to a custom vector processor. The vector unit held 8,192 64-bit registers that could be used in any way from 8,192 one-word to thirty-two 256-word registers. This compares to modern SIMD systems which allow for perhaps eight to sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing schemes. The software ran on Unix System V Release 3 with proprietary support for up to four-way SMP and the vector processor. The compiler was based on the Convex Fortran (and C) compiler. Their significant graphics system for visualization was DORE (Dynamic Object Rendering Environment).

Their goal was to release their Titan supercomputer in July 1987 at a $50,000 price point. By late 1986, however, it became clear that this was unrealistic. A second round of funding came from Kubota Corporation, a Japanese heavy industries company, which had cash to spare and was looking for new opportunities during the strong Yen period. Kubota agreed not only to fund the completion of the Titan. but also to provide production facilities in Japan for sales into the Far East. By the time it was finally ready for testing in February 1988, the performance leadership position of Titan had been eroded and the price had risen to $80,000.

In December 1987, Dana changed its name to Ardent Computer after learning about a local disk drive company called Dana Computer.