Tera Computer Company
Encyclopedia
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
. 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. 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.
High-performance computing
High-performance computing uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.-Overview:...
software
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
and hardware
Computer hardware
Personal computer hardware are component devices which are typically installed into or peripheral to a computer case to create a personal computer upon which system software is installed including a firmware interface such as a BIOS and an operating system which supports application software that...
, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and moved 1988 to Seattle, Washington
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith
Burton Smith
Burton J. Smith is a computer architect. He is currently a Technical Fellow at Microsoft.-Education:Smith earned a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of New Mexico in 1967. He then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning an Sc.D. in 1972.-Career:From 1970 to 1979, he taught at...
. The company's first supercomputer product, named MTA
Cray MTA
The Cray MTA, formerly known as the Tera MTA, is a supercomputer architecture based on thousands of independent threads, fine-grain communication and synchronization between threads, and latency tolerance for irregular computations....
, featured interleaved multi-threading, i.e. a barrel processor
Barrel processor
A barrel processor is a CPU that switches between threads of execution on every cycle. This CPU design technique is also known as "interleaved" or "fine-grained" temporal multithreading...
. 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. 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
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
in 2000, the company was renamed to Cray Inc.