Cray Computer, an offshoot of the pioneering supercomputer company CrayResearch founded by Seymour Cray in Chippewa Falls, Wis. in 1972, went bankrupt in 1995.
In 2003 he heard the tale of a cadre of crack engineers who had quit CrayResearch, the old supercomputer maker, to explore bringing powerful features down to the world of cheap servers.
The Cray XC30 supercomputer is made possible in part by Cray's participation in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems program.