Less than two years after a reboot to switch vendors, one of America’s most ambitious supercomputing projects has gone live. The $350 million Blue Waters supercomputer, which was dedicated last week at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was envisioned as the new frontier in American supercomputing technology.
Cray Inc. (CRAY) is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Already a legend in his field by this time, Cray put his company on the map in 1976 with the release of the Cray-1 vector computer. Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation (CCC), in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995, while Cray Research was bought by SGI the next year. Cray Inc. was formed in 2000 when Tera Computer Company purchased the Cray Research Inc. business from SGI and adopted the name of its acquisition.
