Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise)

Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
Name	Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
Type	Subsidiary
Fate	Acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Industry	Supercomputing
Founded	1972
Founder	Seymour Cray
Headquarters	Seattle, Washington
Products	Supercomputers, interconnects, storage

Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise) Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise) was an American supercomputer company founded by Seymour Cray in 1972, renowned for high-performance computing systems deployed at national laboratories, universities, and corporations. Its systems powered projects at institutions such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and found customers among NASA, European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Sandia National Laboratories, and major corporations. The company’s innovations influenced designs used by IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Intel, and AMD and intersected with organizations like National Science Foundation, Department of Energy (United States), DARPA, and NERSC.

History

Cray originated when Seymour Cray left Control Data Corporation to form Cray Research and subsequently produced machines that competed with systems from CDC 6600, IBM System/360, IBM System/370, and CDC STAR-100. The company evolved through corporate events involving SGI, Tera Computer Company, Convex Computer Corporation, and spin-offs connected to Cray Inc. and later integration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Key eras featured leadership and technical exchanges influenced by figures and entities such as Seymour Cray, Harlan Anderson, William Norris, Clifford Stoll, and collaborations with labs including Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Legal and procurement interactions involved agencies such as General Services Administration, U.S. Air Force, and contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Products and Technologies

Cray produced product lines including the Cray-1, Cray-2, Cray X-MP, Cray Y-MP, Cray T3E, Cray XT, Cray XE, Cray XC, Cray CX, and modular systems integrated with technologies from NVIDIA, Intel Xeon Phi, AMD EPYC, ARM partners, and accelerators from Broadcom and Mellanox Technologies. Storage and I/O technologies interfaced with Lustre, GPFS, InfiniBand, and protocols used by institutions like CERN for LHC simulations. Software ecosystems included support for compilers from GNU Compiler Collection, Intel Fortran Compiler, runtime tools from OpenMP, MPI, and ecosystem projects such as HDF5, NetCDF, OpenACC, and CUDA. Cray systems were deployed with management and monitoring tools influenced by Nagios, Ganglia, SLURM Workload Manager, and integrations with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Architecture and Supercomputer Designs

Cray architectures emphasized vector processing, shared-memory, and distributed-memory designs, drawing lineage from machines like CDC 7600 and influencing contemporaries such as NEC SX-9 and Fujitsu K series. Key architectural innovations included vector pipelines, symmetric multiprocessing, and network topologies like 3D torus and dragonfly used by systems built with components from Mellanox Technologies, Cray SeaStar, and custom ASICs developed alongside partners such as Xilinx and Broadcom. Cray explored heterogeneous computing combining CPUs and GPUs paralleling approaches used by Titan (supercomputer), Summit (supercomputer), Sierra (supercomputer), and projects at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Memory hierarchies integrated high-bandwidth memory concepts that later resonated with implementations from Intel and Samsung.

Corporate Changes and Acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Over decades corporate transitions involved mergers, divestitures, and leadership changes linked to entities like Silicon Graphics International, HPE, Rackable Systems, Compute-Asia, and private equity interactions reminiscent of deals involving Dell Technologies and EMC Corporation. The acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise united Cray technology with HPE product lines and aligned with HPE initiatives such as HPE Apollo and partnerships with Microsoft and Google for exascale and cloud-hybrid strategies. Regulatory and procurement contexts involved agencies including U.S. Department of Defense, European Commission, and international labs in Japan and China.

Major Installations and Notable Systems

Notable Cray systems were installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Cray X-MP), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Cray-2), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Cray XT5 “Jaguar”), Argonne National Laboratory (Cray XC “Mira”), Sandia National Laboratories (Cray XC “Cielo”), and international sites like CERN and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. These systems supported large-scale science projects including climate modeling for NOAA, fusion simulations for ITER, astrophysics collaborations with Space Telescope Science Institute, and genomics projects at Broad Institute. Benchmarks and rankings appeared in lists maintained by TOP500 and collaborations with measurement projects like SPEC.

Research, Innovations, and Contributions to HPC

Cray contributed to parallel programming models, vector compilers, and high-speed interconnect research used by programs funded by DARPA and the National Science Foundation. Innovations influenced work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and university groups at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Cambridge. Research collaborations extended to companies such as Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, Mellanox Technologies, and academic projects including PRACE and HPC-Europa. Cray engineering impacted projects in climate science with UK Met Office, particle physics with CERN, and computational chemistry in partnerships with Pfizer and BASF.

Legacy and Influence on Modern Supercomputing

Cray’s legacy persists in modern systems from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Fujitsu, NVIDIA DGX platforms, and cloud HPC offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Architectural principles from Cray influenced exascale roadmaps at DOE, European Commission Horizon 2020, and national initiatives in Japan and China. The company’s design ethos affected education at institutions like California Institute of Technology and Princeton University, and inspired entrepreneurs and startups in high-performance computing ecosystems including Altair Engineering, Penguin Computing, and Lustrix.

Category:Supercomputing