Text7 seymour cray

Seymour Cray's name will forever be synonymous with high performance computing. He was a pioneer in supercomputing. His innovations include vector register technology and magnetic amplifiers.

Seymour Cray was born in 1925 and died in 1996. His father was a civil engineer. His mother provided his father with a social life to balance his technical job. Growing up Cray had always been fascinated with electronics. In high school he would spend much of his time in the electrical engineering laboratories.

In 1950 Cray received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. A year later he received his Masters degree in Applied Mathematics. Taking the advice of a professor, Cray ventured down the street to Engineering Research Associates(ERA). ERA was one of the first computing facilities in terms of digital circuits. Cray started out working on the 1100 series computers which later turned out to be Univac. He soon found out that there was not much material on the subject of computers to be researched. So he was fed to rely on his own invention.

The first computer Cray designed by himself was the 1103 computer. From this generation down the line to his Cray-4, Cray integrated the qualities and the solutions of previous generations of computers. Cray based his 1103 on simplicity. He did not include anything that was not necessary. Competitors in the business were incorporating bells and whistles into their schemes but Cray stuck to the basics. In addition to simplicity, Cray also concentrated on completing the projects quickly. Time was of superior importance than anything else. Of course, speed was still the fundamental concept of building a computer.

Seymour Cray was not one of the creators of Control Data Corporation, but he was the first technically oriented worker on the staff. Despite the other founders thoughts to jump into commercial computers, Cray kept his goal in mind and convinced the others that they would build scientific computers. Cray saw his benefit to society, he received positive feedback from coworkers and clients and he enjoyed his work.

Seymour Cray had a methodology for creating new computers. First, he would take input from the customers who were using previous models. He would study their complaints and desires. From this information, Cray would figure out how these ideas could be used in his next design.

This design process was essentially a solo project for Cray. Of course he needed support technicians but the basic concepts were his and his alone. Cray felt this was the only way to get things done efficiently and correctly.

As CDC became a bigger company and gained more business, Cray found the distractions to be overwhelming. So he decided to get out of town. He moved to Chippewa Falls and had a research and development facility built there.

Cray's first project at CDC was the1604 Computer. Cray had decided to create this computer using transistors which were still fairly new. The 1604 was very successful in the market because it was the only large computer using transistors at the time. Next for Cray came the 6600 and the 7600 which were the most revolutionary projects for him to date, while still maintaining the scientific focus. In 1972, Cray realised that the market for large scale scientific computers had become small. He decided to open up a small business. Thus was the beginning of Cray Research Inc.. Cray used the newest technology, integrated circuits and vector register technology to build Cray 1. In designing the Cray 1, Cray was able to express himself artistically by giving the Cray 1 an attractive appearance. It was conical in shape so the wires would be on the short inner surfaces of the modules.

Cray went on to design the next immensely successful Cray Research computer, the Cray 2. The Cray 3 computer could reach speeds up to 500MHz but none were ever sold. The Cray 4 was twice as fast as the previous but was never completed. After this successful business had given Cray his fill, he went on to create one more company. He called it Cray Computer Corporation. This business failed, so about a year and a half later in 1996, Cray tried one last time to build a company which would build super fast scientific computers. But On September 22, 1996 around 3:OOPM, Seymour Cray had an accident. He was hurt. He remained in critical and unstable condition until October 5th when he was pronounced dead at2:53AM.