Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and
supercomputerA supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel Birnbaum, then CTO of HP, said of him:
Early life
Cray was born in 1925 in
Chippewa Falls, WisconsinChippewa Falls is a city located on the Chippewa River in Chippewa County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 13,661 at the 2010 census. Incorporated as a city in 1869, it is the county seat of Chippewa County....
to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a
civil engineerA civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering; the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructures while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing infrastructures that have been neglected.Originally, a...
who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of
Erector SetErector Set is the trade name of a toy construction set that is popular in the United States.It consists of collections of small metal beams with regular holes for nuts, bolts, screws, and mechanical parts such as pulleys, gears, and small electric motors.The brand name is currently used for...
components that converted punched paper tape into
Morse codeMorse code is a method of transmitting textual information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment...
signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab".
Cray graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1943 before being
draftedConscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
for
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
as a radio operator. He saw action in
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, and then moved to the
Pacific theatreThe Pacific Theater of Operations was the World War II area of military activity in the Pacific Ocean and the countries bordering it, a geographic scope that reflected the operational and administrative command structures of the American forces during that period...
where he worked on breaking Japanese codes. On his return to the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
he received a
B.Sc.A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
in
Electrical EngineeringElectrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
at the
University of MinnesotaThe University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
, graduating in 1949. He also was awarded a
M.Sc.A Master of Science is a postgraduate academic master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in the sciences including the social sciences.-Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay:...
in
applied mathematicsApplied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...
in 1951.
Control Data Corporation
In 1950, Cray joined
Engineering Research AssociatesEngineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. They became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged...
(ERA) in
Saint Paul, MinnesotaSaint Paul is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city...
. ERA had formed out of a former
United States NavyThe United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
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. He remained at ERA when it was bought by
Remington RandRemington Rand was an early American business machines manufacturer, best known originally as a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation as the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers but with antecedents in Remington Arms in the early nineteenth century. For a time, the...
and then
Sperry CorporationSperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the twentieth century...
in the early 1950s. At the newly formed Sperry-Rand, ERA became the "scientific computing" arm of their
UNIVACUNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
division.
But when the scientific computing division was phased out in 1957, a number of employees left to form
Control Data CorporationControl Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
(CDC). Cray wanted to follow immediately, but CDC's CEO,
William NorrisWilliam Charles Norris was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world...
, refused as Cray was in the midst of completing a project for the Navy, with whom Norris was interested in maintaining a good relationship. The project, the
Naval Tactical Data SystemNaval Tactical Data System, commonly NTDS, refers to a computerized information processing system developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s and first deployed in the early 1960s for use in combat ships.- Reason for development :...
, was completed early the next year, at which point Cray left for CDC as well.
By 1960 he had completed the design of the
CDC 1604The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...
, an improved low-cost ERA 1103 that had impressive performance for its price range. Even as the
CDC 1604The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...
was starting to ship to customers in 1960, Cray had already moved on to designing its "replacement", the
CDC 6600The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
. 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/OIn computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
bandwidth had to be maximized as well in order to avoid "starving" the processor of data to crunch. 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 7600The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
.
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 warNuclear warfare, or atomic warfare, is a military conflict or political strategy in which nuclear weaponry is detonated on an opponent. Compared to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can be vastly more destructive in range and extent of damage...
, 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 shelterA fallout shelter is an enclosed space specially designed to protect occupants from radioactive debris or fallout resulting from a nuclear explosion. Many such shelters were constructed as civil defense measures during the Cold War....
.
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 8600The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while working for the Control Data Corporation. The "natural successor" to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fastest computer on the market.Development started in...
. 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-100The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....
seemed to be progressing more smoothly. 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. 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 StreetWall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
to look for seed capital, he was surprised to find that Cray's reputation was very well known. 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-1The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, and it went on to become one of the best known and most successful supercomputers in history...
. 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 IVThe ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous supercomputers ever built. One of a series of research machines, the ILLIACs from the University of Illinois, the ILLIAC IV design featured fairly high parallelism with up to 256 processors, used to allow the machine to work on large data sets in what...
, a specialized one-off machine that rarely operated near its maximum performance except on very specific tasks. In general, the Cray-1 beat anything on the market by a wide margin.
Serial number 001 was "lent" to
Los AlamosLos Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
in 1976, and that summer the first full system was sold to the
National Center for Atmospheric ResearchThe National Center for Atmospheric Research has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. NCAR is managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and sponsored by the National Science Foundation...
for $8.8 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 80 Cray-1s were sold, and the company was a huge success financially.
Follow-up success was not so easy. While he worked on the
Cray-2The Cray-2 was a four-processor ECL vector supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray Research X-MP designed by Steve Chen in that spot...
, other teams delivered the two-processor
Cray X-MPThe Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985...
, which was another huge success and later the four-processor X-MP. 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 and large main memory, and thus sold in much smaller numbers. The Cray-2 ran at 250 MHz with a very deep pipeline, making it harder to code for than the shorter pipe X-MP.
As the
Cray-3The Cray-3 was a vector supercomputer intended to be Cray Research's successor to the Cray-2. The system was to be the first major application of gallium arsenide semiconductors in computing. The project was not considered a success, and the parent company in Minneapolis decided to end work on the...
project started he found himself once again being "bothered" too much with day-to-day tasks. 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, ColoradoColorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado, United States. Colorado Springs is located in South-Central Colorado, in the southern portion of the state. It is situated on Fountain Creek and is located south of the Colorado...
, near the site of
NCARThe National Center for Atmospheric Research has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. NCAR is managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and sponsored by the National Science Foundation...
and the earlier attempted Cray Laboratories.
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-MPThe Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL technology was used and a new liquid cooling system was...
.
Cray Computer Corporation
Cray decided to spin off the Colorado Springs lab to form
Cray Computer Corporation, taking the Cray-3 project with them.
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. In the past Cray had always avoided using anything even near the
state of the artThe state of the art is the highest level of development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field, achieved at a particular time. It also refers to the level of development reached at any particular time as a result of the latest methodologies employed.- Origin :The earliest use of the term...
, preferring to use well-known solutions and designing a fast machine based on them. 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 parallelMassively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life sciences, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself,...
machines were coming into the market at price/performance points the Cray-3 could not touch. Cray responded through "brute force", starting design of the
Cray-4The Cray-4 was intended to be Cray Computer Corporation's successor to the failed Cray-3 supercomputer. It was marketed to compete with the T90 from Cray Research. CCC went bankrupt in 1995 before any Cray-4 had been delivered.-Design:...
which would run at 1 GHz and outpower these machines, regardless of price.
In 1995 there had been no further sales of the Cray-3, and the ending of the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
made it unlikely anyone would buy enough Cray-4s to offer a return on the development funds. The company ran out of money and filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcyBankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
March 24, 1995.
SRC Computers
Cray had always resisted the
massively parallelMassively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life sciences, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself,...
solution to high-speed computing, offering a variety of reasons that it would never work as well as one very fast processor. 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
compilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
technology made developing programs on such machines not much more difficult than their simpler counterparts.
Cray set up a new company, SRC Computers, and started the design of his own massively parallel machine. The new design concentrated on communications and memory performance, the bottleneck that hampered many parallel designs. Design had just started when Cray died suddenly as a result of a car accident. SRC Computers carried on development and now specializes in
reconfigurable computingReconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like field-programmable gate arrays...
.
Technical approaches
Cray frequently cited two important aspects to his design philosophy: remove heat, and ensure that all signals that are supposed to arrive somewhere at the same time do indeed arrive at the same time.
His computers were equipped with built-in cooling systems, extending ultimately to coolant channels cast into the mainframes and thermally coupled to metal plates within the circuit boards, and to systems immersed in coolants. In a story he told about himself, he realized early in his career that he should interlock the computers with the cooling systems so that the computers would not operate unless the cooling systems were operational. But it did not originally occur to him to interlock in the other direction until a customer reported finding their computer turned off and encased in ice after a very localized power outage had hit the computer over the night but spared the cooling system.
Cray addressed the problem of
skew-In circuit design:In circuit designs, clock skew is a phenomenon in synchronous circuits in which the clock signal arrives at different components at different times...
by ensuring that every signal path in his later computers was the same electrical length, so that values that were to be acted upon at a particular time were indeed all valid values. When required, he would run the traces back and forth on the circuit boards until the desired length was achieved, and he even employed
Maxwell's equationsMaxwell's equations are a set of partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electrodynamics, classical optics, and electric circuits. These fields in turn underlie modern electrical and communications technologies.Maxwell's equations...
in design of the boards to ensure that any radio frequency effects which altered the signal velocity and hence the electrical path length were accounted for.
When asked what kind of CAD tools he used for the Cray-1, Cray said that he liked #3 pencils with
quad paperGraph paper, graphing paper, grid paper or millimeter paper is writing paper that is printed with fine lines making up a regular grid. The lines are often used as guides for plotting mathematical functions or experimental data and drawing diagrams. It is commonly found in mathematics and...
pads. Cray recommended using the backs of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant. When he was told that
Apple ComputerApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
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.
Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award
The
Seymour Cray Computer Engineering AwardThe Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of high-performance computing. The award honors scientists who exhibit the creativity demonstrated by...
is sponsored by the
IEEE Computer SocietyThe IEEE Computer Society is a professional society of IEEE. Its purpose and scope is “to advance the theory, practice, and application of computer and information processing science and technology” and the “professional standing of its members.” The CS is the largest of 38 technical societies...
. Established in late 1997. A crystal memento, illuminated certificate, and $10,000 honorarium are awarded to recognize innovative contributions to high performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray.
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 (these have been termed "Rollwagonisms" from the then CRI CEO). He enjoyed
skiingSkiing is a recreational activity using skis as equipment for traveling over snow. Skis are used in conjunction with boots that connect to the ski with use of a binding....
, wind surfing,
tennisTennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by
elvesAn elf is a being of Germanic mythology. The elves were originally thought of as a race of divine beings endowed with magical powers, which they use both for the benefit and the injury of mankind...
" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
Cray died October 5, 1996 (age 71) of head and neck injuries suffered in a traffic collision on September 22, 1996. Cray underwent emergency surgery and had been hospitalized since the accident 2 weeks earlier. Daniel Rarick, 33, had tried to pass Cray on
Interstate 25Interstate 25 is an Interstate Highway in the western United States. It is primarily a north–south highway. I-25 stretches from Interstate 10 at Las Cruces, New Mexico, , to Interstate 90 in Buffalo, Wyoming, .Interstate 25 is the main north–south expressway through...
in
Colorado Springs, ColoradoColorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado, United States. Colorado Springs is located in South-Central Colorado, in the southern portion of the state. It is situated on Fountain Creek and is located south of the Colorado...
, struck another car, which then struck Cray's
Jeep CherokeeThe Jeep Cherokee is a unibody compact SUV. It shared the name of the original full-size SJ model, but without a body-on-frame chassis, it set the stage for the modern SUV. Its innovative appearance and sales popularity spawned important imitators as other automakers began to notice that this...
, causing it to roll 3 times. Rarick received a citation for
careless driving causing serious bodily injury. He was unhurt in the accident. The entrance/exit at Academy Blvd and I-25 was later reconfigured to be less dangerous.
External links