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Comment by AdamN | Hacker News Reader

Everybody's focused on graph databases here but let's talk about Cray! One of the most forward-thinking computer technology companies ever to exist is starting to get out there again. If they got a few hundred million dollars from an outside investor, they could do friggin' incredible things. They already do incredible things but not out there in the way it so easily could be.

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Cray is a brand name that has been passed around between half a dozen companies (including Sun and SGI) dotted by various kinds of product reboots and commercial failures. Cool stuff but supercomputing isn't the most financially sound business it seems. The current name holder is the company previously called Tera, originally famous for making an aggressively multithreaded HPC computer.

I'm not clear how Sun ever owned Cray care to explain?

The provenance was Cray Research -> SGI -> Tera/Cray according to those that have been around since the Cray Research days.

Source: err, I work here and asked a couple people a few cubes over. :)

The Sun deal was apparently more SGI wouldn't be caught dead with a supercomputer that ran on sparc so it got sold off to Sun.

My bad about Sun. Yep, Sun just bought the SPARC-based stuff & developed further under their own brand (E10k etc).

No worries, just thought i'd clarify.

"an aggressively multithreaded HPC computer" - still sold as Urika-GD, marketed as a dedicated graph appliance. That's where Cray Graph Engine originated.

Cray nowadays is purely a government contracting shop (think healthcare.gov in terms of technology chops).

Wow. That's just patently false. Good job bro!

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