Tera Computer Company
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Supercomputing, Computer hardware |
| Founded | January 1, 1987 in Washington, D.C., United States |
| Founder | James Rottsolk, Burton Smith |
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington , United States |
| Products | MTA supercomputer with barrel processor design |
The Tera Computer Company was established in 1987 by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith in Washington, D.C., before moving its operations to Seattle, Washington in 1988. Known for its cutting-edge supercomputer, the MTA, the company introduced a unique barrel processor design that utilized interleaved multithreading. This approach removed the need for data caches by rapidly switching between threads to manage latency effectively. Additionally, the system incorporated a highly pipelined memory structure combined with address randomization to enhance the handling of concurrent memory accesses.
Tera Computer was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol "TERA". In 1997, it collaborated with Cadence Design Systems, headquartered in San Jose, to create CMOS microprocessors, while its gallium arsenide CPUs were produced by Unisys.
After acquiring the Cray Research division from Silicon Graphics in 2000, Tera Computer adopted the name Cray Inc.. Later, in 2019, Cray Inc. was purchased by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion, thereby broadening HPE’s offerings in the realm of high-performance computing technologies.