Seymour Cray-the father of a supercomputer in the jungle

If we think of computers as the crown of science, supercomputer is undoubtedly the Brightest Pearl of the Crown. The development level of a country's supercomputer is one of the most important international indicators to measure its scientific and technological level. Supercomputer has been applied to some of the most advanced fields in industry, scientific research, and national defense. Among all supercomputer researchers, Seymour Cray is hailed as the "father of supercomputer ".

In 1925, Clay was born from an American engineer family. He grew up fond of electronics and spent a long time in the electrical laboratory in middle school. He was happy to play with all kinds of electrical equipment, radio, motor and various circuits, he has been addicted to it for a long time, so that He seldom participates in various social activities. When I was a child, these experiences seem to have predicted that he will surely embark on an outstanding technical expert path in the future.

After graduating from middle school, the 18-year-old clay joined the Army during its service period at the end of World War II. He traveled south and north with his troops to many war zones in the world. After World War II, Clay returned to the United States and started to go to the University of Wisconsin. Shortly after that, he went to the University of Minnesota and obtained a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the university in 1951, because he felt that some courses were too short of mathematics content, Clay took another year to study mathematics. In 1952, he got a master's degree in mathematics. Just like many people, what should they do after obtaining a degree? Clay began to get confused. At this time Ray' The teacher gave him a suggestion that if I were you, I would go down this road and walk into the Engineering Research Association (ERA ). Clay listener Slave The teacher's suggestion has also laid the development direction of his career.

Then Clay joined era to set the password. At that time, Clay knew nothing about computers. To accomplish his goal, he plunged into the library and began to absorb the knowledge of various computers. Soon after, he designed his first computer ear 1103. But it wasn't long before era was acquired. Clay found that the new company was far behind his own goal-developing the first-stream supercomputer. Finally, Clay chose to leave.

In 1957, clay and several other era colleagues resigned and founded the CDC. At the beginning of the design of CDC 1604, Clay's most important innovation in the electronics industry was the advent of e-tubes. It was precisely because they had just appeared and were very expensive. In the face of a shortage of funds, Clay had to use a lot of obsolete second-hand transistors in the Construction of CDC 1604. Even so, CDC 1604 became the best computer at the time and a unique transistor supercomputer. It was a great success for Clay. With the success of 1604 of CDC's business, Clay's reputation is growing, but for Clay, this may not be a good thing, excessive administrative and social activities make him unable to concentrate on his goals. So Clay reached an agreement with the company to establish a laboratory in the jungle of his hometown of Wisconsin. In the next four years, Clay declined all social interactions, focusing on Supercomputer research, for this reason, someone else gave him a nickname for the jungle hermit. His seclusion was not in vain. The launch of the CDC 1963 In 6600 made the cdc a true leader in the market. After the launch of the CDC 7600, this machine that runs 10 million times per second is recognized as the first super computer in the real sense at that time. Clay became a world-famous super computer expert. Since then, CDC has dominated the entire super computer market.

At that time, CDC was so successful that it moved its eyes to the commercial applications of computers and did not focus on the development of supercomputers. This made clay, who insisted on his belief, leave for the second time. In 1972, Clay was a self-reliant portal and founded clay research. The company aims to produce only supercomputers. After more than ten years, Clay has created CRAY-1, CRAY-2 and other models, he designed all the hardware and operating system of the Cray model, the operating system is completed with machine code. In CRAY-1, he used integrated circuit for the first time to make, speed up to 0.24 billion times per second, is the other models on the market more than 40 times faster, but the price is almost the same, this makes the CRAY-1 has achieved unprecedented success, after the launch of the CRAY-2 is more powerful than the CRAY-1 4 ~ Six times, the speed of running up to 1.2 billion floating point operations per second, a lot of the work that took years to complete before on the CRAY-2 takes only 1 second. In 1984, Clay had a 70% share of the supercomputer market.

But not long, in the late 1980s S, PC development is booming, mainframe and supercomputer are under a greater impact, the end of the CRAY-3 in the business market bleak end. At this time, Clay once again and the company's opinion differences, in 1989 he quit his first-hand founded the clay research company, the establishment of the clay computer company, to study the CRAY-4, however, the design target was 100 billion million models per second, and in 1995 clay computer was forced to declare bankruptcy.

In the face of the ups and downs of his career, Clay never gave up. In 1996, Clay, over 70 years old, once again founded the SRC company and hoped to create a miracle for the world, bad luck suddenly came. On February 19, September 1996, an unexpected traffic accident made clay stop breathing forever at the age of 71.