Nick Gabel CSET 1100 9/4/2013

The Father of Supercomputing

During the early 1960s, the computing field was dominated by well-funded corporations producing large mainframe systems mostly still powered by vacuum tubes. It wasnt until the year 1960 that a little-known company named the Control Data Corporation, led by Seymour Cray, developed the CDC 1604, which was the first solid state computer, as well as the fastest computer in the world at that time (Hannan p 83-84). Seymour Cray and his design teams went on to design some of the fastest supercomputers, breaking many technological barriers and defining a field of computing for generations to come. Seymour Cray was born in 1925 to a loving mother and father. His father was a civil engineer and sparked Seymours interest in science and engineering. He lived in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and attended school there but was eventually drafted into the Navy and worked on the breaking of Japanese naval codes. He then returned to the United States and graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelors degree in electrical engineering and a Masters degree in applied mathematics. Cray then went to work for Engineering Research Associates which built many code-breaking machines for the United States Navy. He eventually began on work for the UNIVAC computer in the late 1950s. After many of his colleagues left and began work for CDC (Control Data Corporation), Cray also followed suit. During the early years at CDC, Seymour worked engineering machines that were marketed as affordable and had business-oriented processing capabilities. Seymour helped develop many of these computers, one of which was the CDC1604 which was the first fully transistorized computer (thocp.net). Frustrated with the constraints on hardware to please CDC marketing, Cray undertook his own project and completed what came to be the first supercomputer, the CDC 6600. This machine was three times faster than its IBM counterpart and was the fastest mainframe system available at the time of its release. But Cray didnt stop there, while at CDC he also developed the CDC 7600, running at 40 Mflops, and the CDC 8600 (cray.com). In 1972 Seymour left CDC and started his own corporation, Cray Research, to develop and build the worlds fastest supercomputers. His first computer developed at Cray (Cray-1) was a massive success. The Cray-1 was the first computer to use a 64 bit architecture, ran at 80 MHz and was developed for speed, even down to the shape of the computer, as it allowed for shorter wires between components. This machine was far superior to any other including the corporate giant, IBMs mainframes at the time and is considered the most successful supercomputer in history (Hill p41). One of the largest problems that Cray was faced with was developing a cooling system that would suffice, given the amount of heat the machine produced. Eventually a Freon-based system was developed and incorporated into the overall design. After his success with the Cray-1, Seymour and his teams developed one of the first multiprocessing computer, the Cray XMP. In 1985 its successor, the Cray-2 used 4 cores and was completely immersed in Fluorinert, which could be seen bubbling in the cooling tower as it

cooled. The Cray-2 shattered the gigaflop barrier and could perform 1.9 Gigaflops, which was, by far, the fastest computer at the time and continued to be the fastest until 1990. The Cray-2 was also a huge success, but unfortunately the next computer Seymour built was not. His latest venture, the Cray-3 was a failure and only one of them was shipped. Seymour, however, was undeterred. He continued to develop well into the mid-1990s, working on a massively parallel computer that would have been years ahead of the competition. However, on October 5th, 1996, Seymour Cray passed away suffering from injuries he sustained 2 weeks earlier in an automobile accident. Even after his death, the Cray computer Corporation continues to make the worlds cutting-edge computers as the legacy of a man who invented the field of supercomputers lives on.

References
Wisconsin Biographical Dictionary by Caryn Hannan 2008 ISBN 1-878592-63-7 pages 83-84 . N.p.. Web. 3 Sep 2013. <http://www.thocp.net/biographies/cray_seymour.htm>.
. N.p.. Web. 3 Sep 2013. <http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/about/SeymourCray.pdf>.

Readings in computer architecture by Mark Donald Hill, Norman Paul Jouppi, Gurindar Sohi 1999 ISBN 978-1-55860-539-8 page 41-48