The Rise and Fall of the Cray Supercomputer

Error
25:43, I meant to say "software" not hardware.

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[randyscorner]

I worked at Intel designing CPUs from 1980 through 2002. In the 80's we watched with interest the "supercomputer wars" which definitely influenced how we approached new processors. We didn't have enough area for large-scale parallelism but started by dedicating an unheard-of portion of the die to a Floating Point Unit. I designed that unit which was used in the 960 series, the 387 and eventually the 486. I was the design manager of the P6 (Pentium Pro/II) where we employed much more parallelism in addition to many techniques that had previously failed (out-of-order processing, speculative execution, register renaming, etc.). The Cray was always an inspiration, and in the late 90's we arrayed our processors and took the computing crown for a while. Interestingly, I knew the guys who started Ncube and even helped them fix their layout plots to avoid some fatal flaws. Those were heady times. We'[re now working on quantum systems, an even headier topic!

[georgegonzalez]

My father worked for CDC at the time Cray was working on the 8600. Cray wasn't keeping HQ up to date as to how things were progressing. They were progressing very slowly. Norris sent my dad, who he knew was a laconic, hardheaded type like Cray, to take a field trip to Chippewa Falls to ask Cray how things were going. That was an inspired decision as Cray spilled the beans, the 8600 was unlikely to ever work due to cooling and reliability issues.

Dad borrowed some of my facsimile paper, a paper coated with toxic but conductive metal powder. If you apply current to the paper you can do a crude analog simulation of heat flow. The flow lines didn't look promising.

My dad brought the bad news back to Norris and he quickly wound down the 8600 project, and that prompted Seymour to leave CDC.

[djdawso]

One minor correction to the video - The CRAY systems weren't C-shaped for cooling purposes, but rather to minimize the length of the backplane wires in order to reduce signal propagation delay. Cooling in the CRAY-1 and a few subsequent systems was provided by freon flowing through the vertical aluminum bars between the columns for the circuit boards, which were layered on both sides of heavy copper plates to conduct the heat from the circuit boards to the cold bars. Very elegant!

[paulw]

Thanks for this. It brought back quite a few memories. I wrote my first program in 1966, and spent my working life in IT. Never was involved with supercomputers, but remember long days spent in looking for ways to reduce instruction path lengths in an airline reservations system on a Univac computer. What a joy it was to see 5 instructions knocked out of the path!

[Viewpoint]

I worked for Control Data in 1970, fresh out of University. I was smart in school but at Control Data I felt like being at the bottom of the ladder. There were a lot of genius people working there. Some were super passionate working 7 days a week, day and night.

[mp]

I met Mr. Cray when he was installing a Y-MP at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. I was a young Lieutenant and they actually used one of my finite element models as a benchmark.

[jimbates]

I once met Seymour Cray. I was a Field Engineer for Data General working in the Minneapolis field office. Cray Research was using a Data General Eclipse computer. I don't recall why. They had a hardware problem with the DG system at their Chippewa Falls facility and I repaired it. It was well after 5:00pm when I finished. I walked the halls of their building to find someone to sign my Field Service Report. That's when I met Seymour Cary, and he signed my FSR that night. I won't forget that encounter or his signature. I was 20 years old but still knew who he was and his legend.

[BlenderRookie]

I am old enough to remember when Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. I also remember Silicon Graphics. I remember being in grade school and middle school seeing magazine covers with Cray computers featured on the front.

[weedmanwestvancouverbc]

One of the most amazing things about the Cray supercomputers were their processing geometry was very unusual. One of my professors giving me a history lecture about this devoted a full hour to the competing geometries.

[OtterFlys]

Thanks! For a trip down memory lane during my days at Sperry Univac///Lockheed Martin…

[denniss]

I was in charge of software maintenance while Seymour was still the leader of Cray Research .. All the wires in the Cray were blue/white and the ladies that wired the system had to know exactly from and to for the connections ... it was mind-blowing how fast they were. Hardware people including engineers HATED software programmers ...

[davidglad]

It's not at all surprising Warren Buffett declined to invest in a company that took a really smart guy to run it. Considering he has said he prefers companies that could be run by a ham sandwich.

[joeszep]

Cray's naming scheme doomed the company. While people would buy a Cray-X or a Cray-Y computer, no one would buy a Cray-Z computer...

[judmcc]

The photos of the Eckert-Mauchly tag and the Cray-1 memory are my photos of my computer parts. I'm glad to see them used.

[GregSr]

In 1986, I worked for a company (Dynamotion) that provided equipment to Cray Research. Specifically, we provided circuit board drilling machines that could drill holes as small as 0.0039" diameter. That's about the diameter of a human hair. I was the applications engineer for Dynamotion. The drilled holes were then interconnected in a board stack using gold wire. Each one inch by one inch board had 2200 holes interconnecting 16 chips on each multi-layer board. The drill bit was spinning at 120, 000 RPM. The spindle shaft was floating on air bearings. Ball bearings produced too much heat and vibration. Back then, air bearing spindles were leading edge. Back in the early 1990's, Chippewa Falls was my "home away from home". That facility is now TTM Technologies.

[thelittlehooer]

Cray was a whimsical man, too. When asked what tools he uses to design supercomputers, he was very specific: a 2B pencil. Anything harder or softer simply didn't leave the most desireable lines. When someone pointed out that Apple used a Cray to design the Macintosh, Cray said he is using a Macintosh to design the next Cray.

[grizwoldphantasia]

I programmed a 6400, the 6600's kid brother which sacrificed parallelism for cheapness, for about 3 years, assembler of course, my second computer (first was an IBM 1620). What was most fascinating to me was how clean the instruction set was, how symmetrical and logical. I didn't really appreciate it for many years after working on others with much more dreadful instruction sets. I'm looking at you, x86, the ugliest instruction set I have ever worked with.

Thornton (with Cray?) later wrote a book on the tricks which went into speeding up the 6600's instruction set, adding to my impression of how clean the 6x00 family was.

The short description of the 6600's multiple processors is slightly misleading from being so short. It had one central processor with 64K (?) of 60-bit memory (60 is 5 columns on a punched card) which had zero I/O capability and no system mode; it was a pure user mode compute machine. There were around 10 PPUs (Peripheral Processing Units) with 4K 12-bit memory each, I think, but that's misleading too. There was really only one real PPU, and it switched context to each of the virtual PPUs in turn, I think every microsecond. Those PPUs did all the I/O to tape drives, card readers and punches, and ran all the system instructions which started and stopped the CPU and switched tasks. Each CPU task stored I/O requests in their location 0, and the PPUs monitored that, executing file I/O and transferring data to and from CPU memory.

There was also extended core memory, 10 times as slow but 10 times as much, with special instructions to copy blocks back and forth.

[doctor]

I took my first CS course in 1969, and am still working in the field. This is one of the better Computer History videos I have seen in a long time--congratulations on this video.

[blurglide]

I walk by one of these old round Cray-2s regularly at work. The plaque says they paid $19M for it (in the 80's), and it's something like 1/100 as powerful as an iPhone X.

Thank you for this video. It tells a great part of my life.
It started with the CDC7000 at ETH in Zurich.
We moved on to the Cray-1.
We were so proud using the fastest computer in the world.
My mentors Niklaus WIrth and C.A. Zehnder pushed me in a wonderful life.
Being now an old guy, hacking on an overclocked Intel Chip, I happily look back on those outstanding machines,