The United States Mint has released the designs for the 2026 American Innovation $1 Coin Program, and one of them honors a monumental moment in the history of HPC: the announcement of the Cray-1 supercomputer.
Released earlier this week, the 2026 coin designs honor, among other states, Wisconsin, the home of Cray Research and the birthplace, under the leadership of the late Seymour Cray and co-founder chief engineer Lester Davis, of the Cray-1.
The face of the coins exhibits a stylized aerial view of the Cray-1 supercomputer, the U.S Mint said, and “The image emphasizes the Cray-1 not only through its shape, but also by suggesting the shape of a “C” for Cray-1 and “computer.” Inscriptions are “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “WISCONSIN.”
The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design. These systems improve the performance of math operations by arranging memory and registers to quickly perform a single operation on a large set of data. Previous systems had implemented these concepts but with limited performance. The Cray-1 ran several times faster than any similar design (see Wikipedia Cray-1 profile).
Over the course of its life on the market, 80 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches covering the power supplies and the cooling system.
Cray-1 (credit: Irid Escent)
According to Wikipedia, after the 80 MHz system was announced in 1975, excitement ran 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. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was the first official customer of Cray Research in 1977, paying $8.86 million for serial number 3. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in 1989.
The coin was designed by Paul Romano, artistic infusion program designer, and sculpted by John P. McGraw, Mint Medallic artist.
