Cray Supercomputer -- Seymour Cray is considered the founder of supercomputing.

Picture of SuperComputer

A supercomputer refers to the class of most powerful computer systems world-wide at the time of reference. The term supercomputer was first applied to the Cray-1 computer. Supercomputers can cost in the billions and have extremely vast capabilities.

Charles Babbage 1791-1871

Seymour Cray

Widely considered to be the founder of supercomputing, Seymour Cray was known for his passion for technological creativity and his constant search for new ideas.

In 1958, Seymour Cray built the first completely transistorized supercomputer for the Control Data Corporation.

In 1964, Seymour Cray developed the CDC 6600, which was the first architecture to use functional parallelism.

Read and Learn >>The History of Computers

Cray Supercomputers

Seymour Cray founded Cray Research in 1972, with a proclaimed mission of designing and building the world's most powerful and usable computers. The company's CRAY-1 supercomputer established a new standard in supercomputing upon its introduction in 1976, and his CRAY-2 system, introduced in 1985, moved supercomputing substantially forward yet again.

Seymour Cray is personally credited as the inventor of several technologies that have been central to supercomputing for two decades, including the CRAY-1 supercomputer's vector register technology and the immersion-cooling technologies of the CRAY-2 computer.

What Can a Supercomputer Do?

Supercomputers have been used to improve car and plane safety, predict dangerous weather accurately, and to design life-saving drugs quickly.

The CRAY-1 is an early example of a class of machines called "supercomputers," so named because of their ability to solve very complex mathematical problems that ordinary computers-even large commercial systems-cannot practically handle.