Cray, Seymour

American Computer Designer
1925–1996

Seymour Cray, widely regarded as the father of supercomputers , was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on September 28, 1925. He died on October 5, 1996, after a car accident. A man of unerring focus, Cray maintained a single goal throughout his lifetime—to build the fastest computer possible.

After obtaining a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Minnesota, Cray started his career with Engineering Research Associates, which became Remington Rand, then Sperry Rand. Here Cray designed his first computer, the ERA 1101. He also helped design the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) 1103. When the UNIVAC shifted its focus away from supercomputers, Cray did not. Instead, he left to start Control Data Corporation (CDC), leading the first design team to abandon vacuum tubes and produce the first commercial transistor -based computer, the CDC 1604, in 1958.

Within a few years, Cray decided that the administrative duties associated with running a successful business interfered with his concentration on computer design. With CDC's blessing, he left for home and solitude in Chippewa Falls. CDC built Cray's laboratory close to his home. His time there proved productive, and in 1963, CDC released the Cray-designed CDC 6600. To reduce heat build-up in the compact unit, Cray installed a freon cooling system inside the computer. This machine was not only three times faster than its IBM counterpart, but was also smaller and a bargain at $7.5 million each. Customers for the 6600 included the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which used it to to study thermonuclear explosions, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, which used it to to assist in weather predictions.

In 1969 CDC released the Cray-designed 7600, which could perform twenty megaflops, or twenty million calculations (floating point operations or FLOPS) per second. Many believe the 7600 was the first supercomputer.

When CDC declined to market Cray's next machine (the 8600), instead expanding into other commercial ventures, Cray again chose to focus on supercomputer design. He started Cray Research in 1972. The Cray 1, released in 1976, was the first computer to master successfully vector processing and at the time was the fastest scalar processor in the world. This single-processor, 160 megaflop computer had 1 million, 64-bit words of central memory, and used three types of integrated circuits . The computer itself was an 8 6 foot (about 2.4 1.8 meter) cylindrical structure. With a maximum wire length of 4 feet (1.2 meters), it still required a total of 60 miles (18.3 meters) of wire. Each unit cost $8.8 million. Cray Research went public in 1976, a month before its first sale (to Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico). The sale of stock raised $10 million, helping the company to survive.

By 1984 Cray Research owned 70 percent of the supercomputer market. Cray himself was worth $17 million. In November of 1981, Cray resigned as CEO of Cray Research to become an independent contractor. Again, he sought solitude to build what he called "simple, dumb things." While he worked on the Cray 2, Cray Research, led by Steve Chen, revised the Cray 1. Chen's resultant Cray X-MP was the first multi-processing computer, able to perform 500 megaflops. The resultant rivalry between Cray and Chen eventually led to Cray's departure from the company in 1989. Cray then founded Cray Computer Corporation of Colorado Springs.

Cray wanted the Cray 2 to be four to six times more powerful than the Cray 1. When finished in 1985 with four processors, the Cray 2 doubled that expectation. This supercomputer had the largest internal memory capacity of any computer (two million bytes) and 256 million words of central memory. It could perform 1.2 gigaflops (or 1.2 million FLOPS per second). Cray fit the entire structure in a C-shaped cabinet 53 inches (136 centimeters) across and 45 inches (115 centimeters) high. To diffuse heat, he immersed the circuits in the coolant Fluorinert. Its cost was $17.6 million. What the Cray 2 accomplished in one second had taken a year to accomplish by hand in 1952. This computer was used to study intense magnetic fields associated with fusion reactors and to help design heat shields for space exploration.

In 1985 Cray began work on the Cray 3, using 16 processors. This machine was based on gallium arsenide instead of silicon , but the design was eventually dropped due to its high development cost. He then began work on the Cray 4, which would have had 64 processors. This project, too, was dropped. Cray Computer filed for bankruptcy protection in 1995.

Still, Cray was convinced that he could design a high performance, low cost system. By the time of his sudden death in 1996, he had established another new company, SRC Computers, toward this goal.

Two factors are cited in the decline of the supercomputer market. First, competition with cheaper and increasingly powerful microprocessors, and the ability for minicomputers to be networked, helped reduce the demand for very expensive machines. Second, with the end of the "Cold War," military budgets were slashed. New supercomputers for military use were no longer a practical consideration, reducing the already exclusive market.

see also Minicomputers; Physics; Supercomputers.

Mary McIver Puthawala

Bibliography

Markoff, John. "Seymour Cray, Computer Industry Pioneer and Father of the Supercomputer, Dies at 71." New York Times, October, 6, 1996, p. 1.

Slater, Robert. "Seymour Cray: The Hermit of Chippewa Falls and His Simple, 'Dumb Things.'" In Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

Internet Resources

Breckenridge, Charles W. "A Tribute to Seymour Cray, SRC Computers, Inc." <http://cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html> A History of Cray. Cray Inc. <http://www.cray.com/company/> "

Power Mac G4 Cube." Apple Computer, Inc. <http://www.apple.com/powermaccube/>