Supertek Computers Inc. was a computer company founded in Santa Clara, California in 1985 by Mike Fung, an ex-

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

project manager A project manager is a professional in the field of project management. Project managers have the responsibility of the planning, procurement and execution of a project, in any undertaking that has a defined scope, defined start and a defined f ...

, with the aim of designing and selling low-cost

minisupercomputer Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s, characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popul ...

s compatible with those from Cray Research. Its first product was the Supertek S-1, a compact, air-cooled,

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...

clone Clone or Clones or Cloning or Cloned or The Clone may refer to: Places * Clones, County Fermanagh * Clones, County Monaghan, a town in Ireland Biology * Clone (B-cell), a lymphocyte clone, the massive presence of which may indicate a pathologi ...

of the

Cray X-MP The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance ...

vector processor

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

running the CTSS (Cray Time Sharing System) operating system, and later a version of Unix. This was launched in 1989. Only ten were sold before Supertek was acquired by Cray Research in 1990 and the S-1 was subsequently sold for a brief time by Cray as the

Cray XMS The Cray XMS was a vector processor minisupercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1990 to 1991. The XMS was originally designed by Supertek Computers Inc. as the Supertek S-1, intended to be a low-cost air-cooled clone of the Cray X-MP with a CMOS r ...

. At the time of the acquisition the Supertek S-2, a clone of the

Cray Y-MP The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL tech ...

, was under development briefly named the Cray YMS, and this was eventually launched as the Cray Y-MP EL in 1992.

References

Parallel.ru: The History of the Development of Parallel Computing

Defunct computer companies based in California Cray Vector supercomputers Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Santa Clara, California Computer companies established in 1985 Companies disestablished in 1990 1985 establishments in California 1990 disestablishments in California Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area {{tech-company-stub