| Type | Manufacturing |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1987 |
| 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] Although it was not a commercial success, the company was a pioneer in multi-threading technology.
Upon acquiring the Cray Research division of Silicon Graphics in 2000, the company was renamed to Cray Inc.[3]