Tera Computer Company

Tera Computer Company

Company type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: TERA
Industry	Manufacturing
Founded	1987;38 years ago (1987)
Founders	James Rottsolk Burton Smith
Defunct	2000;25 years ago (2000)
Fate	Renamed as Cray Inc.
Headquarters	Seattle, Washington
Products	Computer software and hardware

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 their 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 Archived 2014-07-12 at the Wayback Machine
2. "Multi-processor Performance on the Tera MTA". 1999. Archived from the original on 2012-02-22.
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. Miller, Ron (2019-05-17). "HPE is buying Cray for $1.3 billion". TechCrunch . Retrieved 2025-04-06.