The Steve Jobs of supercomputers: We remember Seymour Cray (at 90) Fast, cool, simple. Repeat.

The Register ^ | Oct 2, 2015 | Davin Clarke

[dayglored]

Before Steve Jobs, there was Seymour Cray – father of the supercomputer and regarded as something close to a God in the circles he moved in.

Jobs’ Apple Computer is reputed to have bought one of Seymour’s massive machines back in the day: a Cray, to design the brand-new Macintosh personal computer.

This would have been a significant moment for a man of Jobs' character, not prone to flattering the inventions or ideas of others. In return, Cray is said to have quipped that he'd bought a Mac to design the next Cray.

Cray – who would have been 90 years old this week – was the engineering brain behind a family of systems that broke ground in architecture and performance. They broke new ground on price, too: Cray’s computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the Cray-1 weighing in at $8.8m – an estimated $34m in today’s money.

This meant Crays could be afforded only by the top elite boffins in the arenas of science and the military, who used them to crunch vast models on weather prediction and the potential fallout from nuclear bombs. Such systems were out of the price range of even the biggest private firms.

Irony, indeed, given Jobs’ collaborator Steve Wozniak built the Macintosh in order to democratise computing, as he told your correspondent back in 2011.

Remarkably, and despite the price, it was Cray’s computers which dominated high-performance computing (HPC) for 30 years, seeing off even the mighty IBM. Buying a Cray became like buying IBM elsewhere: it wouldn't get you fired.

[zeugma]

I’ve always thought that Cray’s were awesome looking. It’s amazing that we can now have as much power in a device we can carry along with us. Unfortunately, it seems that most of that newfound horespower is wasted.

[dennisw]

Seymour Cray great American genius.
Steve Jobs, all he knew was marketing. Oh, recent gossip is he ripped off Carly Fiorina at HP but she is alive and Jobs was a short lived phenomena whose wife inherited his 10 billion and is busy blowing it on...what else...liberal crap causes.

[John+Doe+Smith]

You might find this interesting as well;

http://srmsc.org/ref1040.html

Safeguard Data-Processing System PDF’s Info:

Introduction and Overview http://srmsc.org/pdf/005214p0.pdf

The Data-Processing System Performance Requirements in Retrospect http://srmsc.org/pdf/005215p0.pdf

Central Logic and Control Operating System http://srmsc.org/pdf/005219p0.pdf

[ThunderSleeps]

Nice wrap up of an early pioneer in parallel computing... — ANDROID PING!
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