Cray

Cray. Cray was a pioneering American supercomputer manufacturer, founded by legendary computer architect Seymour Cray. The company dominated the high-performance computing market for decades, producing a series of iconic vector supercomputers that were instrumental in scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Its machines were renowned for their innovative architecture and were a fixture at major U.S. Department of Energy laboratories and other leading research institutions worldwide.

History

The company's origins trace back to 1972 when Seymour Cray left Control Data Corporation to form Cray Research. Its first product, the Cray-1, delivered in 1976 to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, became an instant icon with its distinctive C-shaped design and unprecedented performance. Successive vector models like the Cray-2, Cray X-MP, and Cray Y-MP solidified its market leadership through the 1980s. Facing financial challenges and shifting market trends toward massively parallel systems in the 1990s, the company underwent several transformations, including a merger with Silicon Graphics in 1996. After various spin-offs and reorganizations, the core supercomputing business was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2019, ending its run as an independent entity.

Products

Cray's product lineage began with the groundbreaking Cray-1, which utilized integrated circuits and innovative vector processing to achieve its speed. This was followed by the Cray X-MP, a multi-processor system, and the Cray-2, notable for its liquid cooling with Fluorinert. The Cray Y-MP series further expanded multiprocessing capabilities. In the 1990s, the company shifted to parallel architectures with systems like the Cray T3D and Cray T3E, which used DEC Alpha processors. Later significant products included the Cray XT series, using AMD Opteron processors and a custom interconnection network, and the Cray XC series, which incorporated Intel Xeon processors and the Aries interconnect. Its final major platform was the Cray Shasta architecture, featuring the Slingshot interconnect.

Technology and architecture

Cray systems were celebrated for their architectural innovations, particularly in vector processor design, high-speed memory systems, and cooling technologies. The Cray-1 introduced a novel 64-bit vector register architecture and a semiconductor memory that was far faster than contemporary core memory. Cooling solutions evolved from Freon-based systems to the immersive liquid cooling of the Cray-2. A major architectural shift occurred with the Cray T3D, embracing a massively parallel architecture using a high-bandwidth 3D torus interconnect. Later systems, like the Cray XT4, pioneered the use of InfiniBand and custom interconnects such as Gemini and Aries to manage data movement across thousands of nodes, a critical challenge in exascale computing.

Impact and legacy

Cray supercomputers had an enormous impact on computational science, enabling pioneering work in fields like computational fluid dynamics, nuclear weapon simulation, climate modeling, and genomics. Machines like the Cray-1 were essential to research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The company's focus on pure performance set the standard for the supercomputing industry and influenced the design of later high-performance computing systems worldwide. Its legacy is evident in the continued pursuit of exascale computing and the enduring influence of its interconnect and system software technologies on modern HPC clusters.

Company timeline and acquisitions

The corporate history is complex, marked by spin-offs, mergers, and name changes. The original Cray Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996. The Cray brand was revived in 2000 when Tera Computer Company, founded by James Rottsolk, acquired Cray Research from Silicon Graphics and renamed itself Cray Inc. This entity later acquired key competitors and technology firms, including OctigaBay Systems in 2005, which brought the Cray XT3 line, and Appro International in 2012. It also formed strategic partnerships with Intel and AMD. The company was publicly traded on the NASDAQ until its acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise was finalized in September 2019, integrating its technology into HPE's high-performance computing division. Category:Supercomputer companies