Seymour Cray

Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."

Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "laboratory".

Cray graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1943 before being drafted for World War II as a radio operator. He saw action in Europe, and then moved to the Pacific theatre where he worked on breaking Japanese naval codes. On his return to the United States he earned a B.Sc. in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1949, followed by a M.Sc. in applied mathematics in 1951.

In 1950, Cray joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ERA had formed out of a former United States Navy laboratory that had built codebreaking machines, a tradition ERA carried on when such work was available. ERA was introduced to computer technology during one such effort, but in other times had worked on a wide variety of basic engineering as well.

Cray quickly came to be regarded as an expert on digital computer technology, especially following his design work on the ERA 1103, the first commercially successful scientific computer. He remained at ERA when it was bought by Remington Rand and then Sperry Corporation in the early 1950s. At the newly formed Sperry Rand, ERA became the scientific computing arm of their UNIVAC division.

Cray, along with William Norris, later became dissatisfied with ERA, then spun off as Sperry Rand. In 1957, they founded a new company, Control Data Corporation.

By 1960 he had completed the design of the CDC 1604, an improved low-cost ERA 1103 that had impressive performance for its price. Even as the CDC 1604 was starting to ship to customers in 1960, Cray had already moved on to designing other computers. He first worked on the design of an upgraded version (the CDC 3000 series), but company management wanted these machines targeted toward "business and commercial" data processing for average customers. Cray did not enjoy working on such "mundane" machines, constrained to design for low-cost construction, so CDC could sell many of them. His desire was to "produce the largest [fastest] computer in the world". So after some basic design work on the CDC 3000 series, he turned that over to others and went on to work on the CDC 6600. Nonetheless, several special features of the 6600 first started to appear in the 3000 series.

Although in terms of hardware the 6600 was not on the leading edge, Cray invested considerable effort into the design of the machine in an attempt to enable it to run as fast as possible. Unlike most high-end projects, Cray realized that there was considerably more to performance than simple processor speed, that I/O bandwidth had to be maximized as well in order to avoid "starving" the processor of data to crunch. He later noted, "Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system."

Cray married Verene Voll in 1947. They had known each other since childhood. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister, as was Cray's mother, and Verene worked as a nutritionist. They had three children. Cray and Voll divorced around 1978. He later married Geri M. Harrand. Cray was the grandfather of Andrew Cray, an LGBTQ rights activist.

Cray avoided publicity. There are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. Cray enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."

The IEEE Computer Society's Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, established in late 1997, recognizes innovative contributions to high performance computing systems exemplifying Cray's creative spirit.