Tera Computer Company

The Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of high-performance computing software and hardware, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C., and moved 1988 to Seattle, Washington, by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith.[1] The company's first supercomputer product, named MTA, featured interleaved multi-threading, i.e. a barrel processor. It also had no data cache, relying instead on switching between threads for latency tolerance, and used a deeply pipelined memory system to handle many simultaneous requests, with address randomization to avoid memory hot spots.[2]

The company was listed on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol "TERA".[3]

In 1997, Tera Computer went to San Jose, California-based Cadence Design Systems Inc to develop microprocessors for its use in CMOS technology. Unisys manufactured Tera's gallium arsenide CPU.[4]

Upon acquiring the Cray Research division of Silicon Graphics in 2000, the company was renamed to Cray Inc.[5][6]

In 2019, Cray Inc. was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion.[7]

See also

  • Heterogeneous Element Processor

References

  1. Cray Inc., History^
  2. Multi-processor Performance on the Tera MTA 1999^
  3. SDSC Headlines^
  4. Tera Goes to Cadence for Help with Cmos Supercomputer Chip 15 April 1997^
  5. Supercomputer maker to buy Cray, change name cnet news, 2000^
  6. Tera Computer buys Cray from SGI, readies CMOS processors 2 March 2000^
  7. Ron Miller. HPE is buying Cray for $1.3 billion TechCrunch, 2019-05-17, retrieved 2025-04-06^