(Cray, Inc., Seattle, WA, www.cray.com) A supercomputer manufacturer founded in 1972 as Cray Research, Inc., by Seymour Cray, a leading designer of large-scale computers at Control Data. In 1976, it shipped its first computer to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The CRAY-1 was a 75 MHz, 64-bit machine with a peak speed of 160 megaFLOPS, making it the world's fastest vector processor.

Over the years the company has introduced numerous models of entry-level to high-end supercomputers including the X-MP, Y-MP, C90, T90, J90, T3E, SV1, SV2 and MTA series. All Unix based, they are used for many different industrial, technical and commercial applications.

In 1989, Seymour Cray left his company to found Cray Computer Corporation, which closed six years later. In 1996, Cray Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). In 2000, Tera Computer Company acquired the vector processor technology from SGI and changed its name to Cray, Inc. The company's latest generation high-performance computing systems are microprocessor based and use AMD's multicore Opteron platform. These supercomputers directly connect processors and memory and include Cray's XT3 and XD1, released in the fall of 2004.