Cray Research and Control Data Vector Supercomputers

This group gathers the line of vector supercomputers built by Seymour Cray's two companies, Control Data Corporation and the Cray Research firm he founded in 1972 after leaving CDC. Control Data's CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally regarded as the first successful supercomputer, using a fast scalar pipeline design that outran the IBM 7030 Stretch. Cray Research continued the same design lineage with the Cray-1, Cray X-MP and Cray-2, each holding the title of the world's fastest computer on release through the 1970s and 1980s. ETA Systems, a spinoff of Control Data, extended the family with the vector-processing ETA10 in the late 1980s. Decades later, Cray Inc., the renamed successor to Cray Research, built the hybrid CPU-GPU supercomputer Titan for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, carrying the same corporate design lineage into the petaflop era even though its architecture moved beyond pure vector processing.