Seymour Cray

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.