Vsevolod Sergeevich Burzew

Vsevolod Sergeevich Burzew ( Russian Всеволод Сергеевич Бурцев , English transcription Vsevolod Sergeevich Burtsev; born February 11, 1927 in Moscow ; † June 14, 2005 ibid) was a Russian computer architect and leading expert in the former Soviet Union for high-performance computers .

life and work

Burzew studied at the Moscow Institute for Electrical Engineering (MPEI) and then went to the Institute for Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology (IPMCE, ITM CT) of Sergei Alexejewitsch Lebedew (later named after Lebedew), under which he worked on the further development of the BESM series in his diploma project involved. From 1953 to 1956 he developed the computer Diana 1 and 2 for the evaluation of radar signals and simultaneous target acquisition, the subject of his doctoral thesis. Its development revolutionized Soviet anti-aircraft and missile defense. From 1956 he continued work with the development of the M-40 and M-50 computers for missile defense, which were delivered in the late 1950s. The M-40 was the fastest mass-produced Soviet computer at the time and already worked as a kind of parallel computer with independent control for the arithmetic unit, control unit, computer memory and external memory with signal transmission in input and output in asynchronous multiplexing over ten channels and with a total transmission rate of 1 Mbit per second. M-50 was a floating point version of M-40 and went into series production in 1959. For this Burzew received the Lenin Prize with Lebedev .

The call for faster and more reliable computers led from 1961 to the development of the 5E92b and its floating point version 5E51 in the 1960s, also for missile defense. In them, the use of multiple processor cores was demonstrated for the first time in the Soviet Union (1967 systems with eight processor cores). The number of cores was increased not only for speed but also for reliability. From 1969 to 1972 he developed the third-generation S-300 on-board computer for anti-aircraft missiles. It had three modular parallel processor cores and performed about as much as the BESM -6 of the IPMCE with a small space requirement of around one cubic meter.

In the 1970s he was chief designer of the IPMCE (1973 director) and it was there that the high-performance computers Elbrus-1 and 2 by Boris Artaschessowitsch Babajan were created , in which Burzew was significantly involved. Elbrus-1 finished in 1980 and achieved 15 million operations per second (OPS), Elbrus-2 with ten processors finished in 1985 with 125 million OPS. They were superscalar computers that were ten years ahead of developments in this area in the West.

1986 to 1993 Burzew led the development of a parallel computer with optical data processing, which reached 1 gigaflop.

In addition to his development work, he taught for several decades at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and at the Moscow University of Aviation Technology. He completed his habilitation in 1962 (Russian doctorate) and has been a professor at the IPMCE since 1965. He published over 150 scientific papers.

Honors

In 1976 he became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 1992 he became a full member. He received the Lenin Prize (1966), and in 1972 and 1985 the State Prize of the USSR , the Order of the October Revolution and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and the Sergei A. Lebedev Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Web links

• Biography of Nitussov, Russian Virtual Computer Museum
• The era of the supercomputers in the ESER, with photo by Burzew