Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and computer designer known as the father of supercomputing. After earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's in applied mathematics from the University of Minnesota, he worked at Engineering Research Associates before helping found Control Data Corporation, where he designed the CDC 6600, released in 1964 and widely regarded as the first commercial supercomputer because it far outperformed every competing machine of its era, followed by the five-times-faster CDC 7600. In 1972 he founded Cray Research and designed the Cray-1, released in 1976 and eventually sold in more than 80 units, whose design philosophy emphasizing heat removal and precise signal timing became a model for high-performance computer design. He went on to found Cray Computer Corporation and later SRC Computers, continuing to design supercomputers until his death, and the IEEE Computer Society created the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 1997 in his honor.
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What was special about the CDC 6600 that Seymour Cray designed?
It was the first commercial supercomputer, fast because Cray optimized the whole system including I/O rather than the processor alone.
Cray wanted to produce the largest and fastest computer in the world, and he put considerable effort into making the CDC 6600 run as fast as possible. He realized there was more to performance than processor speed and that I/O bandwidth had to be maximized to avoid starving the processor of data, later noting, Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system. The 6600 was the first commercial supercomputer and outperformed everything then available by a wide margin. IBM stumbled when it attempted to create machines with similar performance, in the IBM 7030 Stretch. Cray solved the critical design problem of imprecise interrupts in the 6600.
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Source Wikipedia: Seymour CrayLead sentence 1Quote, Lead sentence 1
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines.
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1. Wikipedia: Seymour Cray
Lead sentence, opening parenthesis
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925
Lead sentence, closing parenthesis
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925, October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer
Lead sentence, descriptive clause
was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect
Infobox, Born row, date
(1925-09-28)September 28, 1925
Infobox, Died row
October 5, 1996(1996-10-05) (aged 71)
Infobox, Born row, full name
Born: Seymour Roger Cray
In Field: Electrical Engineering, Lead section
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925, October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines.
In Group: Computing Hardware and Network Pioneers, Introduction
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925, October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines.
Invented: Supercomputer, Lead paragraph
Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry
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