Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. is a pioneering computer company that has been making supercomputers since the early 1970s.

The company was founded as Cray Research in 1972 by Seymour Cray, who designed the first commercially successful supercomputer, the CDC (Control Data Corporation) 6600. Released in 1964, the CDC 6600 had a single CPU and was capable of three million floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Cray is known as the father of the supercomputer. Originally, the company performed research, development and manufacturing from headquarters in Cray's home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Cray-1 was the world’s fastest supercomputer and the company has since won that title a number of times throughout its numerous restructurings, mergers and acquisitions. Seymour Cray died in 1996 after a car accident, following the bankruptcy of his spinoff company, Cray Computer Corporation.

Today Cray Inc. carries on with work in supercomputer design, consulting and manufacturing. Comany headquarters are now in Seattle, Washington, with additional engineering and manufacturing facilities in California, Minnesota, Texas and Wisconsin. As recently as 2012, Cray developed Titan, an Nvidia Kepler GPU-based supercomputer, which also held the title of world’s fastest.

See a video demonstration of building a Cray supercomputer: