Also: Packard To Lease Space On Dayton’s Bluff
By Mitch Berg
Saint Paul is looking to bring…
…Cray Supercomputer to downtown Saint Paul?
The St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority will vote Wednesday on whether to approve a $400,000 forgivable loan for Cray Inc. to move into a downtown building.
Cray, a global supercomputer company based in Seattle, is considering moving about 200 employees from its Mendota Heights operation to 48,000 square feet of space in Galtier Plaza, 380 Jackson St.
On the one hand I, who used to be a contractor at Cray, am just a little surprised that Cray still exists (and that it’s based in Seattle), and that it still employs 20, much less 200 people. I know there’s still a market for “supercomputers” in doing fluid dynamics and other really large-scale number-crunching applications, but I’d sort of thought that massively-parallel Unix and Linux distributed networks had eaten up the whole market.
Well, most of it; when I worked at Cray, it occupied an entire complex out on Lone Oak Road (it’s now an R&D facility for Ecolab) and was overflowing even that. Then Silicon Graphics bought the place, and we know how that turned out, judging by how many Silicon Graphics computers you see out there anymore.
Crayons are a pretty tightly-knit clicque Ex-Crayons have had their own website ever since Cray started shredding jobs in the mid-nineties. And while I was the lowliest contractor in the whole building (a tech writer doing a business plan for the Software Division), I still have some sentiment for the place; it was there, having been a tech writer for a year and already bored out of my mind with the field, that I first encountered Usability and User-Centered Design; it took four years of reading and self-study, but it was the first step in getting to my current career.
Anyway – glad to see ’em coming downtown. Hope they avoid the fate of every other entity that has ever taken up shop at Galtier…
May 13th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Oxygen was way ahead of its time.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Cray does a bunch of stuff here, and they still have some pretty cool technology, but you’re right, the sheer race of technology has reduced them to niche status.
Still, it seems strange to see St. Paul trying to steal from Mendota Heights. But the folks I know who work at Cray won’t appreciate the commute into downtown St. Paul! Compared to 494 near 35E, heading into the loop on either 35E or 94 is a nightmare.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Go ahead, laugh all you want, but St. Paul is giving us GUARANTEED FREE RESERVED PARKING FOR 10 YEARS if we move to the soon-to-be-renamed Cray Center.
If we last 10 years.
Our big concern at the moment is figuring out how, when we hold our annual picnic in Mears Park, we’ll be able to tell the homeless guys from some of our engineers.
May 13th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
The engineers will be the shabbily dressed people using LOX to start the barbecue.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
cybrrr – hah! That sounds like the Cray I remember. And free parking? Hmmm – do they need someone to set up a UX shop?
Terry – very true.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I’ve never used LOx to start a barbeque since you lose too many barbeques that way, but I have used LN2 to make vodka ice cubes.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Terry Says:
May 13th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
The engineers will be the shabbily dressed people using LOX to start the barbecue. >>
So, I’m assuming that you are not referring to the kind of Lox that goes on a bagel….? (Yes, I get it.)