Mikhail Alexandrovich Karzew

Mikhail Alexandrowitsch Karzew ( Russian Михаил Александрович Карцев , English transcription Mikhail Alexandrovich Kartsev ; born May 10, 1923 in Kiev , † April 23, 1983 in Moscow ) was a Soviet computer engineer.

Life

Karzew came from a family of teachers and was a soldier in a tank unit right after graduating from school in 1941 until the beginning of 1947. Immediately after his release, he studied at the Moscow Electrical Engineering Institute (MEPI) in the radio engineering department. While still a student, he was involved in the M-1 project of building an early computer (under Isaak Bruk and Nikolai Jakowlewitsch Matjuchin ). The team consisted of young engineers - Matyuchin was even four years younger than Karzew.

In 1952 he led the construction of the successor M-2 in the Bruk laboratory, which they completed in just one and a half years. It was in operation in 1953 and ran for fifteen years without major complications. In 1956, Karzew expanded it to include a ferrite core memory. In 1957 he was entrusted by Bruk with the scientific management of the M-4 project for process computers of radar networks for air defense (AG Shishlov and VS Seminikhin also played a leading role). It was one of the first Soviet 2nd generation computers with transistor logic. The first computer was available for test purposes in 1959. Even during the testing phase, technical progress made it necessary to further develop the M-4M (for which Karzew had to overcome considerable bureaucratic resistance), which was produced from 1964 to 1985 and around 100 copies were made, all for air defense.

His proposal for a RISC processor with parallel computer components (M-9), which was way ahead of its time and was supposed to have 1000 times the performance of the BESM-6 (which reached around 1 million instructions per second), did not catch on in 1967 because the necessary electronic components were not available. But ideas from this were incorporated into the M-10 project of a supercomputer, which began in 1969. The first computer was delivered in 1973 and it was produced for 15 years. They were used in particular in the early warning system for ballistic ICBMs and were classified as secret. However, Karzew also succeeded in promoting its use for purely scientific purposes, for example in plasma physics (for fusion reactors) - the computer was much faster than the contemporary ES-1040 and twenty times faster than the BESM-6. In 1977 he again received a State Prize of the USSR for this .

In 1967 his design office (part of the Bruk Institute for Electronic Control Machines) was given its own building. His institute was later named after him after his death.

In 1978 he started his project for a supercomputer M-13 with 225 vector processors . Production began in 1984. Like the M-10, it was used in missile defense.

He also wrote books on computer architecture.

In 1956 he received his doctorate (candidate title). For his work on the M-4M he received the Russian doctorate and in 1967 the State Prize of the USSR.

He received the Order of Lenin and the Red Banner of Labor.

Web links

• Biography of Nitussov in the Russian Virtual Computer Museum