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 S. 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.” Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is “the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry.”