Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an American
electrical engineer and
supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded
Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel Birnbaum, then
chief technology officer of
Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them."