As a graduate student at MIT, Hillis co-founded Thinking Machine Corporation to produce and market parallel computers, developing a series of influential products called the Connection Machine. At the time the company produced many of the fastest computers in the world. The Connection Machine was used in demanding computation and data-intensive applications. It was used by the Stanford Exploration Project for oil exploration and for pioneering data mining applications by American Express, as well as many scientific applications at organizations including Schlumberger, Harvard University, University of Tokyo, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Army High Performance Computing Research Center, University of California Berkeley, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Syracuse University.