How the Sun Enterprise 10000 was born (2007)

A group of engineers in San Diego left their jobs at well established corporations (especially a large number of former NCR employees) to form their own company. They set out to build massively parallel computers with Sparc processors. The market they were targetting has traditionally been a hard one, and they had a hard time surviving. They were acquired by similar companies and reshaped several times, most notably their second to last acquisition by Cray Research, Inc.. They were also joined with several engineers in Beaverton, Oregon through these mergers. Under Cray's leadership, they produced a machine with 64 Sparc processors called the CS6400 (or more affectionately called the SuperDragon since it was an implementation of Sun's sun4d architecture, similar to what would be found in a SparcCenter 2000 computer from Sun). The CS6400 supported a feature called Dynamic System Domains, meaning that its multiple system boards could be electronically isolated into distinct sets (called ... Read full article.