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]