The Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

and hardware, founded in 1987 in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, and moved 1988 to

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is the List of municipalities in Washington, most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington (state), Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the List of Unit ...

, by James Rottsolk and

Burton Smith Burton J. Smith (March 21, 1941 – April 2, 2018) was an American computer architect. He was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. Education Smith graduated from the Cate School in Carpinteria, California in 1958, where he established himself as ...

. The company's first supercomputer product, named MTA, featured interleaved multi-threading, i.e. a

barrel processor A barrel processor is a CPU that switches between threads of execution on every cycle. This CPU design technique is also known as "interleaved" or "fine-grained" temporal multithreading. Unlike simultaneous multithreading in modern superscalar ...

. 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. The company was listed on

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

under the ticker symbol "TERA". 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. Upon acquiring the Cray Research division of

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

in 2000, the company was renamed to

Cray Inc. Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

https://www.eetimes.com/tera-computer-buys-cray-from-sgi-readies-cmos-processors/ In 2019, Cray Inc. was acquired by

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas. It is a business-focused organization which works in servers, storage, networking, containerization software and ...

for $1.3 billion.

References

* Software companies based in Seattle Computer companies established in 1987 Computer companies disestablished in 2000 Software companies established in 1987 Silicon Graphics Defunct software companies of the United States Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies {{tech-company-stub

See also

References