| Seymour Roger Cray | |
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| Born | September 28, 1925 Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, USA |
|---|---|
| Died | October 5, 1996 (aged 71) Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA |
| Residence |  U.S. |
| Fields | Applied mathematician, computer scientist, and electrical engineer |
| Institutions | Control Data Corporation Cray Computer Corporation Cray Research Engineering Research Associates SRC Computers |
| Alma mater | University of Minnesota |
| Known for | Supercomputers |
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925[1] – October 5, 1996[2]) was a U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded the company Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Events 48 BC - Pompey the Great is assassinated on orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt after landing in Egypt. Year 1925 ( MCMXXV) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Geography Chippewa Falls is located at (44934110 -91393228 According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 11 Events 869 - The Fourth Council of Constantinople is convened to decide about what to do about Patriarch Photius of Constantinople Year 1996 ( MCMXCVI) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar) The City of Colorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the County seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado, The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Applied mathematics is a branch of Mathematics that concerns itself with the mathematical techniques typically used in the application of mathematical knowledge to other domains Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their Electrical engineering, sometimes referred to as electrical and electronic engineering, is a field of Engineering that deals with the study and application of Control Data Corporation (CDC, was one of the pioneering Supercomputer firms Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington. Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington. Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s SRC Computers Inc is a privately owned company established in 1996 in Colorado Springs Colorado by Seymour Cray, shortly before his death on October Alma mater is Latin for "nourishing mother" It was used in Ancient Rome as a title for the mother Goddess, and in Medieval The University of Minnesota Twin Cities ( U of M or The U) is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system. A supercomputer is a Computer that is at the frontline of processing capacity particularly speed of calculation (at the time of its introduction Events 48 BC - Pompey the Great is assassinated on orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt after landing in Egypt. Year 1925 ( MCMXXV) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Events 869 - The Fourth Council of Constantinople is convened to decide about what to do about Patriarch Photius of Constantinople Year 1996 ( MCMXCVI) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar) The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Electrical engineering, sometimes referred to as electrical and electronic engineering, is a field of Engineering that deals with the study and application of A supercomputer is a Computer that is at the frontline of processing capacity particularly speed of calculation (at the time of its introduction Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington. Called "the father of supercomputing,"[2] Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry through his efforts. [3] Joel Birnbaum, then CTO of HP, 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 furtherest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them. | ” |
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— Joel Birnbaum[4]
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Contents |
Early life
Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Geography Chippewa Falls is located at (44934110 -91393228 According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 11 His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. A civil engineer is a person who practices Civil engineering, one of the many engineering professions As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. Erector Set is the trade name of a toy Construction set that was wildly popular in the United States during much of the 20th century Punched tape or paper tape is a largely obsolete form of Data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data Morse code is a Character encoding for transmitting telegraphic information using standardized sequences of short and long elements to represent the letters numerals The basement of the family home was given over to Cray as a "lab".
Cray graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1943 before being drafted for World War II as a radio operator. Conscription (also known as the draft, the call-up or national service) is a general term for involuntary labor demanded by some established authority World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including He saw action in Europe, and then moved to the Pacific theatre where he worked on breaking Japanese codes. The Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO was the World War II military activity in the Pacific Ocean and the countries bordering it a geographic scope On his return to the United States he received a B. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Sc in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1950. Electrical engineering, sometimes referred to as electrical and electronic engineering, is a field of Engineering that deals with the study and application of The University of Minnesota Twin Cities ( U of M or The U) is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system. He also was awarded a M. Sc in applied mathematics in 1951. Applied mathematics is a branch of Mathematics that concerns itself with the mathematical techniques typically used in the application of mathematical knowledge to other domains
Control Data Corporation
In 1950, Cray joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s Saint Paul ( abbreviated St Paul) is the capital and second most populous city in the U ERA had formed out of a former United States Navy lab that had built codebreaking machines, a tradition ERA carried on when such work was available. ERA was introduced to computer technology during one such effort, but in other times had worked on a wide variety of basic engineering as well.
Cray quickly came to be regarded as an expert on digital computer technology, especially following his design work on the ERA 1103, the first commercially successful scientific computer. The UNIVAC 1103 or ERA 1103 a successor to the UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed by Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington He remained at ERA when it was bought by Remington Rand and then Sperry Corporation in the early 1950s. Remington Rand (1927–1955 was an early American Computer manufacturer best known as the original maker of the UNIVAC I, and now part of Unisys Sperry Corporation (1910-1986 was a major American equipment and Electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the twentieth century At the newly formed Sperry-Rand, ERA became the "scientific computing" arm of their UNIVAC division. UNIVAC serves as the catch-all name for the American manufacturers of the lines of mainframe computers by that name which through mergers and acquisitions underwent
But when the scientific computing division was phased out in 1957, a number of employees left to form Control Data Corporation (CDC). Control Data Corporation (CDC, was one of the pioneering Supercomputer firms Cray wanted to follow immediately, but William Norris refused as Cray was in the midst of completing a project for the Navy, with whom Norris was interested in maintaining a good relationship. William Charles Norris ( July 14, 1911 near Red Cloud Nebraska &ndash August 21, 2006) was the pioneering CEO of The project, the Naval Tactical Data System, was completed early the next year, at which point Cray left for CDC as well. Naval Tactical Data System, commonly NTDS, refers to a computerized Information processing system developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s and first By 1960 he had completed the design of the CDC 1604, an improved low-cost ERA 1103 that had impressive performance for its price range. The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The UNIVAC 1103 or ERA 1103 a successor to the UNIVAC 1101, was a computer system designed by Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington
Even as the CDC 1604 was starting to ship to customers in 1960, Cray had already moved on to designing its "replacement", the CDC 6600. The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The CDC 6600 was a Mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. Although in terms of hardware the 6600 was not on the leading edge, Cray invested considerable effort into the design of the machine in an attempt to enable it to run as fast as possible. Unlike most high-end projects, Cray realized that there was considerably more to performance than simple processor speed, that I/O bandwidth had to be maximized as well in order to avoid "starving" the processor of data to crunch. In Computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an Information processing system (such as a Computer) and the outside As he later noted, Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.
The 6600 was the first commercial supercomputer, outperforming everything then available by a wide margin. While expensive, for those that needed the absolutely fastest computer available there was nothing else on the market that could compete. When other companies (namely IBM) attempted to create machines with similar performance, he increased the challenge by releasing the 5-fold faster CDC 7600. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray -designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data 's dominance of the Supercomputer field into the
The Chippewa Lab
During this period Cray had become increasingly annoyed at what he saw as interference from CDC management. Cray always demanded an absolutely quiet work environment with a minimum of management overhead, but as the company grew he found himself constantly interrupted by middle managers who (according to Cray) did little but gawk and use him as a sales tool by introducing him to prospective customers.
Cray decided that in order to continue development he would have to move from St. Paul, far enough that it would be too long a drive for a "quick visit" and long distance telephone charges would be just enough to deter most calls, yet close enough that real visits or board meetings could be attended without too much difficulty. After some debate, Norris backed him and set up a new lab on land Cray owned in his hometown of Chippewa Falls. Some of the reason for the move may also have to do with Cray's worries about an impending nuclear war, which he felt made Minneapolis a serious safety concern. His house, built a few hundred yards from the new CDC lab, included a huge bomb shelter. For the general article about fortified structures see Bunker.
The new Chippewa Lab was set up in the middle of the 7600 project, although it does not seem to have delayed the project. After the 7600 shipped, he started development of its replacement, the CDC 8600. The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray 's Supercomputer designs while working for Control Data. It was this project that finally ended his run of successes at CDC in 1972.
Although the 6600 and 7600 had been huge successes in the end, both projects had almost bankrupted the company while they were being designed. The 8600 was running into similar difficulties and Cray eventually decided that the only solution was to start over fresh. This time Norris wasn't willing to take the risk, and another project within the company, the CDC STAR-100 seemed to be progressing more smoothly. The STAR-100 was a Supercomputer from Control Data Corporation (CDC one of the first machines to use a Vector processor for improved math performance Norris said he was willing to keep the project alive at a low level until the STAR was delivered, at which point full funding could be put into the 8600. Cray was unwilling to work under these conditions and left the company.
Cray Research
The split was fairly amicable, and when he started Cray Research in a new lab on the same Chippewa property a year later, Norris invested $300,000 in start-up money. Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington. Like CDC's organization, Cray R&D was based in Chippewa Falls and business headquarters were in Minneapolis. Unlike CDC, Cray's manufacturing was also in Chippewa Falls.
At first there was some question as to what exactly the new company should do. It did not seem that there would be any way for them to afford to develop a new computer, given that the now-large CDC had been unable to support more than one. But when the President in charge of financing traveled to Wall Street to look for seed capital, he was surprised to find that Cray's reputation was very well known. Wall Street is a street in lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. A seed round, sometimes known as a friends and family round or seed funding, is a Securities offering whereby one or more parties that have some connection Far from struggling for some role to play in the market, the financial world was more than willing to provide Cray with all the money they would need to develop a new machine.
After several years of development their first product was released in 1976 as the Cray-1. The Cray-1 was a Supercomputer designed by a team including Seymour Cray for Cray Research. As with earlier Cray designs, the Cray-1 made sure that the entire computer was fast, as opposed to just the processor. When it was released it easily beat almost every machine in terms of speed, including the STAR-100 that had beaten the 8600 for funding. The only machine able to perform on the same sort of level was the ILLIAC IV, a specialized one-off machine that rarely operated near its maximum performance except on very specific tasks. ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous Supercomputers ever in a series of research machines ILLIACs, from the University of Illinois. In general, the Cray-1 beat anything on the market by a wide margin.
Serial number 001 was "lent" to Los Alamos in 1976, and that summer the first full system was sold to the National Center for Atmospheric Research for $8. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a The National Center for Atmospheric Research ( NCAR) is a non-governmental U 8 million. The company's early estimates had suggested that they might sell a dozen such machines, based on sales of similar machines from the CDC era, so the price was set accordingly. But in the end well over 100 Cray-1s were sold, and the company was a huge success financially.
When asked what kind of CAD tools he used for the Cray-1, Cray said that he liked #3 pencils with quadrille pads. Cray recommended using the backs of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant. When he was told that Apple Computer had just bought a Cray to help design the next Apple Macintosh, Cray commented that he had just bought a Macintosh to design the next Cray. Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a Brand name which covers several lines of Personal computers designed developed and marketed by Apple Inc [5]
Follow-up success was not so easy. While he worked on the Cray-2, other teams delivered the four-processor Cray X-MP, which was another huge success. The Cray-2 was a vector Supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. The Cray X-MP was a Supercomputer designed built and sold by Cray Research. When the Cray-2 was finally released after six years of development it was only marginally faster than the X-MP, largely due to very fast memory, and thus sold in much smaller numbers.
As the Cray-3 project started he found himself once again being "bothered" too much with day-to-day tasks. The Cray-3 was a Supercomputer intended to be Cray Research 's successor to the Cray-2. In order to concentrate on design, Cray left the CEO position of Cray Research in 1980 to become an independent contractor, working from a new lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, near the site of NCAR and the earlier attempted Cray Laboratories. The City of Colorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the County seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado,
In 1989 Cray was faced with a repeat of history when the Cray-3 started to run into difficulties. An upgrade of the X-MP using high-speed memory from the Cray-2 was under development and seemed to be making real progress, and once again management was faced with two projects and limited budgets. They eventually decided to take the safer route, releasing the new design as the Cray Y-MP. The Cray Y-MP was a Supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP.
In 1996 Silicon Graphics bought Cray Research, and eventually the division was merged with Tera Computer Company to form Cray Inc.
Cray Computer Corporation
Cray decided to spin off the Colorado Springs lab to form Cray Computer Corporation, taking the Cray-3 project with them. Silicon Graphics Inc (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) is a company Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of High-performance computing software and hardware, founded in 1987 in Seattle Washington by Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington.
The 500 MHz Cray-3 proved to be Cray's second major failure. In order to provide the tenfold increase in performance that he always demanded of his newest machines, Cray decided that the machine would have to be built using gallium arsenide semiconductors. Gallium arsenide ( GaAs) is a compound of two elements Gallium and Arsenic. In the past Cray had always avoided using anything even near the state of the art, preferring to use well-known solutions and designing a fast machine based on them. This article is about the Amiga demo for other uses see State of the art (disambiguation. But in this case Cray was developing every part of the machine, even the chips inside it.
Nevertheless the team was able to get the machine working and installed their first example at NCAR. The machine was still essentially a prototype, and the company was using the installation to debug the design. By this time a number of massively parallel machines were coming into the market at price/performance points the Cray-3 could not touch. Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science life science medical diagnostics and other fields Cray responded through "brute force", starting design of the Cray-4 which would run at 1 GHz and outpower these machines, regardless of price. The Cray-4 was intended to be Cray Computer 's successor to the failed Cray-3 Supercomputer.
In 1995 there had been no further sales of the Cray-3, and the ending of the cold war made it unlikely anyone would buy enough Cray-4's to offer a return on the development funds. Cold War is the state of conflict tension and competition that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR and their respective allies from the The company ran out of money and had to file for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a legally declared inability or impairment of ability of an individual or organization to pay their Creditors Creditors may file a bankruptcy petition against
SRC Computers
Cray had always resisted the massively parallel solution to high-speed computing, offering a variety of reasons that it would never work as well as one very fast processor. Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science life science medical diagnostics and other fields He famously quipped "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" By the mid-1990s this argument was becoming increasingly difficult to justify, and modern compiler technology made developing programs on such machines not much more difficult than their simpler counterparts. A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another
Cray set up a new company, SRC Computers, and started the design of his own massively parallel machine. SRC Computers Inc is a privately owned company established in 1996 in Colorado Springs Colorado by Seymour Cray, shortly before his death on October The new design concentrated on communications and memory performance, the bottleneck that hampered many parallel designs. Design had just started when Cray suddenly died as a result of a car accident. SRC Computers carried on development and now specializes in reconfigurable computing. Reconfigurable computing is a computing paradigm combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing
Personal life
Beyond the design of computers Cray led a "streamlined life". He avoided publicity and there are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work. He enjoyed skiing, wind surfing, tennis and other sports. Snow skiing is a group of sports utilizing Skis as primary equipment Windsurfing is a surface water sport using a windsurf board also commonly called a sailboard usually two to five meters long and powered by a single sail Tennis is a sport played between two players ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles) Another favourite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he once attributed the secret of his success to elves. An elf is a creature of Norse mythology. The elves were originally imagined as a race of minor nature and fertility gods, who are often pictured as youthful-seeming "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem. "[6] German avant-garde industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten cite Cray and his tunnel as partial inspiration for their song Schacht von Babel. Einstürzende Neubauten (ˈaɪnˌʃtʏɐʦəndə ˈnɔʏˌbaʊtən is an Avant-garde music band originally from West Berlin, formed in 1980
Cray died October 5, 1996 (age 71) of head and neck injuries suffered in a traffic collision on September 22, 1996. Events 869 - The Fourth Council of Constantinople is convened to decide about what to do about Patriarch Photius of Constantinople Year 1996 ( MCMXCVI) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar) Events 66 - Emperor Nero creates the Legion I Italica. 1236 - The Lithuanians Year 1996 ( MCMXCVI) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar) Cray underwent emergency surgery and had been hospitalized since the accident 2 weeks earlier. A Chevy Camaro driven by Daniel Rarick, 33, tried to pass Cray on Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, struck another car, which then struck Crays' SUV, causing it to roll 3 times. The City of Colorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the County seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado, A sport utility vehicle ( SUV) is a generic marketing description for a rugged automotive vehicle similar to a Station wagon but built on a light-truck chassis Rarick received a citation for careless driving causing serious bodily injury. He was unhurt in the accident. Cray's Jeep Cherokee vehicle was designed using a Cray supercomputer. [7]
See also
References
- Charles J. The Charles Babbage Institute (also titled the Center for the History of Information Technology) is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing James Nicholas "Jim" Gray (born 1944 lost at sea January 28, 2007) was an American Computer scientist who received the Turing Gordon Bell (disambiguation C Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is a Computer engineer and manager Murray (1997). The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-04885-2.
External links
- A Seymour Cray Perspective
- Seymour Cray Interview
- Seymour Cray: An Appreciation
- A Tribute to Seymour Cray
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cray, Seymour Roger |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Applied mathematician, computer scientist, and electrical engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 28, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | 5 October 1996 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA |
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