Sometimes called "the father of supercomputing," Cray was a U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines. He has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry.
Cray was born on September 28, 1925, in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. He showed an early aptitude for electronics and pursued his interests at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1950, followed by a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1951. He then joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he worked on some of the earliest commercial computers.
In 1957, Cray co-founded Control Data Corporation (CDC) with William Norris and several colleagues. At CDC, he led the design of the CDC 1604, one of the first fully transistorized computers, and later the landmark CDC 6600, which became the world's fastest computer upon its release in 1964. His work at CDC established his reputation as the preeminent designer of high-performance computing systems.
Cray founded Cray Research in 1972 to focus exclusively on building the world's fastest computers. The company delivered the Cray-1 in 1976, which became one of the most successful supercomputers ever built. Subsequent designs, including the Cray X-MP and Cray-2, continued to set performance records and cemented his legacy as the defining figure of an era in high-performance computing.
