Cray

Cray refers to an American high-performance computing company best known for its vector- and parallel-processing supercomputers. It originated from Cray Research, founded in 1972 by Seymour Cray, a prominent designer who is often called the father of supercomputing. The company rapidly established itself as a leading supplier of supercomputers during the 1970s and 1980s.

The first major system, the Cray-1, released in 1976, popularized vector processing and achieved high performance for scientific workloads, becoming iconic for its distinctive curved cabinet and advanced cooling. In the following years Cray introduced a series of successors and multi-processor designs, including the Cray X-MP and Cray Y-MP, which extended scalability and performance for large-scale computations. While the company pursued rapid hardware innovation, it also faced intense competition and periodic cost pressures.

In 1996 Cray Research was acquired by SGI (Silicon Graphics), and Cray continued as the high-end HPC brand within SGI. The Cray line evolved through the XT, XE, and XK product families, incorporating distributed memory architectures and, later, accelerators and GPUs in certain configurations. In 2000s and 2010s, Cray systems were widely deployed for government laboratories, universities, and industry for simulations, climate modeling, and data-intensive workloads.

In 2019 Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Cray, integrating Cray into its HPC business and continuing to market Cray systems under the Cray name. The acquisition positioned Cray within HPE’s strategy for exascale and large-scale computing, with newer models marketed as Cray EX systems alongside existing HPC platforms. Cray’s legacy includes influential designs that helped shape modern high-performance computing.