Supercomputer legend Seymour Cray dies at 71

Electronic News, Oct 14, 1996 by Sarah Cohen

Colorado Springs, Colo.--Seymour R. Cray, the world's greatest supercomputer designer, died on Oct. 5 at Penrose Hospital here, from head and neck injuries received three weeks ago as a result of a car accident. He was 71.

Mr. Cray most recently founded SRC Computers. His previous company, Cray Computer Corp., descended into Chapter 11 protection from creditors last year, and ultimately into liquidation. The future of SRC without the genius of Mr. Cray as chief scientist remains uncertain, as does the prospects for gallium arsenide circuit-based supercomputers in general.

Still, Mr. Cray's legacy will live on in his inventions, such as the Cray 1 supercomputer preserved in the Deutsche Museum in Munich, Germany; in design innovations such as vector processing that chained together long series of calculations, and conical shape packaging that allowed a decrease in systems wiring; and in the stories compiled by friends and admirers of this unique man. Mr. Cray was a self-described "nerd." Others referred to him as modest, witty and brilliant. Still others called him quirky and a hermit. His co-workers found his style amusing enough to begin the compilation of "Seymour stories" to be distributed to Mr. Cray's family and friends, and perhaps sold to the public.

One well-known story has to do with boats. An emotional Nick Krajewski, chief engineer of packaging and development for Cray Research, explained to Electronic News that every summer Mr. Cray would design and build a boat, and would burn it the next summer. This represented, Mr. Krajewski said, a clean slate and fresh ideas for the coming year.

Mr. Krajewski also recollected Mr. Cray's bouts of physical labor--sometimes consisting of tearing down trees and building tunnels in his backyard to clear his mind.

It perhaps befits the life of Mr. Cray that on the Internet, Mr. Cray is becoming legendary. Newsgroups have already lent their assistance in the "Seymour story" compilation process. One newsgroup contributor wrote, "My favorite Seymour story has to do with the famous 24-bit registers. Mr. Cray said he had consulted with lots of engineers during the development of the Cray 1 and asked, 'What is the densest memory we can expect over the next N years?" The engineers guessed 'maybe 4 kilobytes per chip.' Mr. Cray multiplied that number by some fudge factor like 4x, then with a little math, he figured that the most memory that would fit in the Cray 1 footprint was 24 bits. "You know how conservative those damned engineers are," he said.

Mr. Cray was born on Sept. 28, 1925, in Chippewa Falls, Wis., the son of a civil engineer. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution in 1994, Mr. Cray described his father as a "thing-oriented person, instead of a human-oriented person." Mr. Cray believed he mirrored his father in this sense, and as a consequence, Mr. Cray permitted others to run his companies while he concentrated on design.

Mr. Cray graduated from high school and entered the Army in 1943. Because he was "reluctant to get into the service, (he) ended up in the infantry." He arrived in Europe after D-Day, but "saw the Battle of the Bulge and tramped (his) way through Germany to meet the Russians." His Army tenure ended in the Pacific theater.

He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1951 with a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in mathematics. Mr. Cray remarked, "During my college days, I concentrated on things that were digital, and digital things in those days were not comprehended as being computers. It wasn't until after college that I appreciated that there was a whole world of digital computing."

Following the recommendation of an instructor, Mr. Cray took his first job at Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a converted wooden glider factory. At ERA, he worked on the 1100 series computer and on what ended up being Univac. The first computer he designed himself was the 1103 Computer."My guiding principle was simplicity." (Industry observers note that while the invention of the reduced instruction set is accredited to IBM, Mr. Cray had been using RISC-type principles from the outset of his career.)

When Remington Rand, a typewriter company, and later Sperry Rand merged with ERA some years later, Mr. Cray's distaste for managerial decisions that put his projects on the back burner evinced itself. "I got the picture I wasn't mainstream anymore...I thought I got the clear message when I found an accounting system, and my project was (listed) under '999 Miscellaneous.' "

Mr. Cray followed ERA's founder, William C. Norris, into a new company--Control Data Corp. It was here that Mr. Cray developed some of his most important computing designs. Mr. Cray noted that at the heart of his designs was the advanced utilization of the transistor.

Newsgroup contributor Douglas W. Jones described some of Mr. Cray's more noteworthy designs while at Control Data: "The CDC 160, 12 bits per word, introduced around 1960, was one of the first transistorized machines to reach the market and a good candidate for the title 'the first minicomputer.' "