he purchased in Chippewa Falls, Cray and a group of former CDC employees started looking for ideas. At first, the concept of building another supercomputer seemed impossible, but after Cray Research's Chief Technology Officer travelled to Wall Street and found a lineup of investors willing to back Cray, all that was needed was a design. For four years Cray Research designed its first computer. In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. The excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was the first official customer of Cray Research in 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) for serial number 3. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in 1989. The company expected to sell perhaps a dozen of the machines, and set the selling price accordingly, but ultimately over 80 Cray-1s of all types were sold, priced from $5M to $8M. The machine made Seymour Cray a celebrity and his company a success, lasting until the supercomputer crash in the early 1990s. Based on a recommendation by William Perry's study, the NSA purchased a Cray-1 for theoretical research in cryptanalysis. According to Budiansky, "Though standard histories of Cray Research would persist for decades in stating that the company's first customer was Los Alamos National Laboratory, in fact it was NSA..." The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the first two models but met a somewhat limited commercial success because of certain problems at producing sustained performance in real-world applications. A more conservatively designed evolutionary successor of the Cray-1 and X-MP models was therefore made by the name Cray Y-MP and launched in 1988. By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS, while the A13 processor in a 2020 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS, a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994. Background Typical scientific workloads consist of reading in large data sets, transforming them in some way and then writing them back out