29 Facts About Seymour Cray

1.

Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer 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.

2.

Seymour Cray's father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering.

3.

Seymour Cray graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1943 before being drafted for World War II as a radio operator.

4.

Seymour Cray saw action in Europe, and then moved to the Pacific theatre where he worked on breaking Japanese naval codes.

5.

In 1950, Seymour Cray joined Engineering Research Associates in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

6.

Seymour Cray quickly came to be regarded as an expert on digital computer technology, especially following his design work on the ERA 1103, the first commercially successful scientific computer.

7.

Seymour Cray remained at ERA when it was bought by Remington Rand and then Sperry Corporation in the early 1950s.

8.

Seymour Cray first worked on the design of an upgraded version, but company management wanted these machines targeted toward "business and commercial" data processing for average customers.

9.

Seymour Cray did not enjoy working on such "mundane" machines, constrained to design for low-cost construction, so CDC could sell many of them.

10.

Seymour Cray's desire was to "produce the largest [fastest] computer in the world".

11.

In 1963, in a Business Week article announcing the CDC 6600, Seymour Cray clearly expressed an idea that is often misattributed to Herb Grosch as so-called Grosch's law:.

12.

Seymour Cray decided that in order to continue development he would have to move from St Paul, far enough that it would be too long a drive for a "quick visit" and long-distance telephone charges would be just enough to deter most calls, yet close enough that real visits or board meetings could be attended without too much difficulty.

13.

Seymour Cray's house, built a few hundred yards from the new CDC laboratory, included a huge bomb shelter.

14.

The 8600 was running into similar difficulties and Seymour Cray eventually decided that the only solution was to start over fresh.

15.

Seymour Cray was unwilling to work under these conditions and left the company.

16.

In general, the Seymour Cray-1 beat anything on the market by a wide margin.

17.

In 1989, Seymour Cray was faced with a repeat of history when the Seymour Cray-3 started to run into difficulties.

18.

An upgrade of the X-MP using high-speed memory from the Seymour Cray-2 was under development and seemed to be making real progress, and management was faced with two projects and limited budgets.

19.

Seymour Cray decided to spin off the Colorado Springs laboratory to form Seymour Cray Computer Corporation.

20.

Seymour Cray ran out of money and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy 24 March 1995.

21.

Seymour Cray had always resisted the massively parallel solution to high-speed computing, offering a variety of reasons that it would never work as well as one very fast processor.

22.

Seymour Cray set up a new company, SRC Computers, and started the design of his own massively parallel machine.

23.

Design had just started when Seymour Cray was killed in a car accident.

24.

Seymour Cray frequently cited two important aspects to his design philosophy: remove heat, and ensure that all signals that are supposed to arrive somewhere at the same time do indeed arrive at the same time.

25.

Seymour Cray's computers were equipped with built-in cooling systems, extending ultimately to coolant channels cast into the mainframes and thermally coupled to metal plates within the circuit boards, and to systems immersed in coolants.

26.

Seymour Cray addressed the problem of skew by ensuring that every signal path in his later computers was the same electrical length, so that values that were to be acted upon at a particular time were indeed all valid values.

27.

Seymour Cray died on October 5,1996, two weeks after his automobile was struck on the highway and rolled several times.

28.

Seymour Cray was the daughter of a Methodist minister, just as was Cray's mother, and Verene worked as a nutritionist.

29.

Seymour Cray later married Geri Harrand and had one son and two daughters.