Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray ( born September 28, 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, USA; † 5 October 1996 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States) was a pioneer and first successful architect for supercomputers. He founded Cray Research in 1972, the first successful company for the sale of supercomputers.
Training
After high school graduation in 1943, he was drafted into the army during the Second World War. After his return, he studied at the University of Minnesota until 1950 electrical engineering. The Bachelor of Science and lent next year Master of Applied Mathematics, he finished his education.
Professional career
As early as 1950 Cray worked at Engineering Research Associates ( ERA ) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. With his work on the ERA in 1103, his first commercially successful scientific computer, he won quickly the reputation of a respected computer designer.
With the purchase of the ERA by Remington Rand and Sperry Corporation mid-1950s, the business segment of the ERA shifted towards commercially attractive computers. This prompted Cray, after completion of an important project for the U.S. Navy for the company Control Data Corporation ( CDC) to change that had already been established from time to ERA a year earlier William C. Norris and others of his colleagues. Cray was the first technical skilled in the company and was able in 1960 to finish the design for the CDC 1604, which was an improved and cost-effective version of the ERA 1103. With the CDC 6600 Cray reached despite average hardware due to the outstanding design a performance that put everything on the market available in the shade. The attempt by IBM, with its own supercomputer to achieve a similar performance, Cray countered with the development of the CDC 7600, with the increased performance again by a factor of 5.
The enormous cost of developing the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600 CDC had the company brought close to bankruptcy, although both machines after the completion of major successes were. The risk associated with the development of the CDC 8600 was Bill Norris too great, especially since he had another very promising project running with the CDC STAR -100. This led in 1972 to the amicable separation of Cray and Control Data Cooperation and subsequently establishing the Cray Research, at the Bill Noris participated in return with $ 300,000.
1976 Seymour Cray presented his famous Cray -1, the first product of his new company. He sold the first copy for $ 8.8 million to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Cray at the time was a staunch opponent of multiprocessor technology. This meant that the Cray -2 over the same time developed by other teams 4-processor Cray X -MP computer was only slightly faster. This performance advantage also based only on better hardware. 1980 Cray was with the launch of the Cray - 3 project on his position as CEO of Cray Research to devote full attention to the development of this computer.
Nine years later, Cray was the Cray -3 facing the same problem as with the CDC 8600th The evolution of the Cray X -MP seemed to be the more successful project in the limited budget of Cray Research, and was preferred by the management as a better solution.
Therefore Cray decided once 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 of substance and was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1995. Cray founded in consequence, the company SRC Computers.
In 1968 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award and the 1989 Eckert - Mauchly Award.
In his honor, awarded the IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, the.
Death
Cray died of injuries resulting from a car accident on October 5, 1996 at the age of 71 years.
- Computer scientist
- History of computer science
- Personality of Electrical Engineering
- Americans
- Born in 1925
- Died in 1996
- Man