The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers

Summary

The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers (Review) 2025-06-11 The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes is a technical and business history of the roughly three-decades when Seymour Cray dominated the development of a class of computer called the “supercomputer”. The book covers the development of the major supercomputer models, the technical decisions and trade-offs involved, and changes to the market. The book ends with SGI’s purchase of Cray’s assets and the transition to massively parallel processing. The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes. By Boelie Elzen and Donald MacKenzie. ACM Books. ISBN 979-8-4007-1369-9. DOI 10.1145/3705551. Early on, computer designs were bifurcated between the domains of “business computing” and “scientific computing.” Business computing was almost exclusively fixed-point, dealt with categorical and string data, often I/O bound, and had a broad base of less technical users with often similar problems (e.g. payroll). Scientific computing heavily used floating point, dealt with complex numerical data such as matrices and chains of differential equations, often CPU bound, and featured a very small base of highly technical users with specialized and often unique problems (e.g. national laboratories). In 1964, this bifurcation was exemplified by the release of two products. IBM launched the IBM 360, a new computing platform that came to dominate business management. Control Data Corporation (CDC), co-founded by Seymour Cray, released the CDC 6600. While IBM sold more than 1,000 in its first month, the CDC took a decade to sell 100. However, the 6600 claimed the moniker “fastest computer in the world” and only relinquished the claim to its successor, the 6700. Although IBM could take solace in finding greater monetary success in a much larger market, Thomas J. Watson Jr. was mortified that IBM had lost the performance crown to a tiny team with far fewer resources. Over ten chapter...