Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington.

[12] In 1950, Seymour Cray began working in the computing field when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Copying the previous arrangement, Cray kept the research and development facilities in Chippewa Falls, and put the business headquarters in Minneapolis.

However, the changing political climate (collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War) resulted in poor sales prospects.

[13] A series of massively parallel computers from Thinking Machines Corporation, Kendall Square Research, Intel, nCUBE, MasPar and Meiko Scientific took over the 1980s high performance market.

At first, Cray Research denigrated such approaches by complaining that developing software to effectively use the machines was difficult – a true complaint in the era of the ILLIAC IV, but becoming less so each day.

[14] New vendors introduced small supercomputers, known as minisupercomputers (as opposed to superminis) during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which out-competed low-end Cray machines in the market.

In December 1991, Cray purchased some of the assets of Floating Point Systems, another minisuper vendor that had moved into the file server market with its SPARC-based Model 500 line.

[15] These symmetric multiprocessing machines scaled up to 64 processors and ran a modified version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems.

In May 2004, Cray was announced to be one of the partners in the United States Department of Energy's fastest-computer-in-the-world project to build a 50 teraFlops machine for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

On October 4, 2004, the company announced the Cray XD1 range of entry-level supercomputers which use dual-core 64-bit Advanced Micro Devices Opteron central processing units running Linux.

The XD1 provided one Xilinx Virtex II Pro field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with each node of four Opteron processors.

Red Storm was to become the jumping-off point for a string of successful products that eventually revitalized Cray in supercomputing.

The Cray XT3 massively parallel supercomputer became a commercialized version of Red Storm, similar in many respects to the earlier T3E architecture, but, like the XD1, using AMD Opteron processors.

[28] Introduced in 2006, the Cray XT4 added support for DDR2 memory, newer dual-core and future quad-core Opteron processors and utilized a second generation SeaStar2 communication coprocessor.

[33] The first generation of such systems, dubbed the Rainier Project, used a common interconnect network (SeaStar2), programming environment, cabinet design, and I/O subsystem.

[35] This system, with over 224,000 processing cores, was dubbed Jaguar and was the fastest computer in the world as measured by the LINPACK benchmark[36] at the speed of 1.75 petaflops[37] until being surpassed by the Tianhe-1A in October 2010.

This new interconnect included a true global-address space and represented a return to the T3E feature set that had been so successful with Cray Research.

The next generation Cascade[38] systems were designed make use of future multicore and/or manycore processors from vendors such as Intel and Nvidia.

Cascade was scheduled to be introduced in early 2013 and designed to use the next-generation network chip and follow-on to Gemini, code named Aries.

In 2011 Cray also announced it had been awarded the $188 million Blue Waters contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, after IBM had pulled out of the delivery.

[49] However, in 2022, the Cray Fortran compiler still supported OpenACC,[50] in part due to its usage in the ICON climate simulation code.

[51] In April 2012, Cray announced the sale of its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $140 million.

[52][53][54] On November 9, 2012, Cray announced the acquisition of Appro International, Inc., a California-based privately held developer of advanced scalable supercomputing solutions.

[55] As of 2012 the #3 provider on the Top100 supercomputer list, Appro builds some of the world's most advanced high performance computing (HPC) cluster systems.

[57] In October 2020, HPE was awarded the contract to build the pre-exascale EuroHPC computer LUMI, in Kajaani, Finland.