Seymour Cray

Seymour Cray

Seymour Roger Cray (born September 28, 1925 in Chippewa Falls , Wisconsin , USA ; † October 5, 1996 in Colorado Springs , Colorado , USA) was a pioneer and first successful architect for supercomputers . He founded Cray Research in 1972 , the first successful supercomputer distribution company.

education

After graduating from high school in 1943, he was drafted into the military during World War II . On his return he studied electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota until 1950 . He completed his education with a Bachelor of Science and the Master of Applied Mathematics , which was awarded the following year .

Professional background

Seymour Cray

As early as 1950, Cray worked for Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul , Minnesota . With his work on the ERA 1103 , his first commercially successful scientific computer, he quickly gained a reputation as a respected computer designer.

With the purchase of ERA by Remington Rand and the Sperry Corporation in the mid-1950s, ERA's business shifted towards more commercially attractive computers. This prompted Cray, after completing an important project for the US Navy, to move to Control Data Corporation (CDC), which William C. Norris and others of his ERA colleagues had founded a year earlier. Cray was the first technical specialist in this company and was able to complete the design for the CDC 1604 as early as 1960 , which was an improved and inexpensive version of the ERA 1103. With the CDC 6600 , Cray achieved a performance that put everything available on the market in the shade, despite the average hardware due to the outstanding design. The attempt by IBM to achieve a similar performance with its own supercomputer, Cray countered with the development of the CDC 7600 , with which the performance increased again by a factor of 5.

The enormous cost of developing the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600 had brought CDC close to bankruptcy, although both machines became great successes when completed. The risk involved in developing the CDC 8600 was too great for Bill Norris, especially since he had another very promising project going with the CDC STAR-100 . This led to the amicable separation of Cray and Control Data Corporation in 1972 and subsequently to the establishment of Cray Research , in which Bill Norris invested $ 300,000 in return.

In 1976 Seymour Cray presented the famous Cray-1 , the first product from his new company. He sold the first copy to Los Alamos National Laboratory for $ 8.8 million . At the time, Cray was a staunch opponent of multiprocessor technology . As a result, the Cray-2 was only slightly faster than the 4-processor Cray X-MP computer developed at the same time by other teams . This performance advantage was based only on better hardware. In 1980, with the start of the Cray 3 project , Cray gave up his position as CEO of Cray Research to devote himself fully to the development of this computer.

Nine years later, Cray faced the same problem with the Cray-3 as with the CDC 8600. The further development of the Cray X-MP appeared to be the more successful project with the limited budget of Cray Research and was preferred by management as the better solution.

So Cray decided again to change employers and founded a new laboratory under the name Cray Computer Corporation in Colorado Springs , Colorado . The 500 MHz Cray-3 was Cray's first commercial failure. While working on the 1 GHz Cray-4 , his company lost more and more substance and had to file for bankruptcy in 1995. Cray then founded the company SRC Computers .

In 1968 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award and in 1989 the Eckert-Mauchly Award .

In his honor the IEEE Computer Society presents the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award .

death

Cray died of injuries from a car accident on October 5, 1996 at the age of 71.