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UMPTEEN GIGABYTES OF GENIUS
THE SUPERMEN
By Charles J. Murray The giant was aroused. Within months, Big Blue was promising customers souped-up models of its new System/360 computers, claiming they would outperform CDC's machine. In fact, those high-end 360s never existed--and never would--but the mere pledge was enough: For 18 months, CDC could not book a single order for its very real and deliverable 6600. In response, Control Data sued IBM in 1968 as being a monopoly selling ''paper tigers.'' Big Blue eventually settled, but not before Watson's scathing memo was made public--or before more than a dozen other companies, and even the U.S. government, filed similar antitrust actions. IBM was kept busy in court until 1982. As it turns out, the rather shy engineer who so angered Watson--and who is the focus of Charles J. Murray's interesting new book, The Supermen--later came to be recognized as one of digital computing's few heroic figures. Seymour R. Cray was a reclusive and somewhat eccentric but brilliant engineer whose name is now synonymous with supercomputers. Always pushing the outer limits of computer performance, Cray worked with every major hardware technology, from vacuum tubes in the 1950s to exotic gallium-arsenide microchips in the 1990s. Through it all, he enjoyed the glory of great technical and commercial success and the admiration of the entire computer industry. Sadly, it all ended on a tragic note. Among the things Murray describes best is how Cray stands out as one of the few computer designers who had the individual genius and independence to conceive new computers from scratch--not once, but again and again. Nearly all other successful computer families, from IBM's System/360 to Intel Corp.'s x86 line of microprocessors, have been parented and nurtured by committees that struggled to exploit new technologies while maintaining compatibility with past designs. Cray, by contrast, always started with a clean sheet of paper, producing one record-breaking machine after another. Cray's triple challenge was always this: make digital circuits run faster, which means hotter, too; cram more of those circuits closer together so they can communicate faster; then, extract the heat from that dense, toaster-hot package so it won't burn up. To cool his machines, Cray used everything from compressed Freon to automotive fuel injectors spraying oil. It is Cray's personality and approach--the wide-ranging mind that was not above grappling with small, tactile problems--that make him such a compelling figure. Moreover, writes Murray, ''the performance of his machines--coupled with his well-known eccentricities--created an extraordinary mystique.'' (By contrast, consider today's Internet entrepreneurs, with their ethereal software products, and think how colorless their life stories may seem in the future.) Cray even helped design the basic logic, or architecture, of his machines. The 6600, for instance, was the first computer to employ an approach that 20 years later was hailed as revolutionary--so-called reduced instruction set computing, or RISC. While IBM's committees jammed 735 instructions into a high-performance computer called STRETCH--which bombed spectacularly in the early 1960s--the 6600 sped by on only 64. Murray does a fine job of tracing Cray's career through a succession of companies: Engineering Research Associates, Remington Rand, Control Data, Cray Research, and finally, Cray Computer. At each step along the way, he explains the technical and commercial challenges that confronted and finally defeated his subject, whose final creation, the Cray-3, never made it out the door. Unfortunately, the author fails to probe much below the surface of either the business of supercomputing or, more disappointingly, of Cray as a person. What really motivated this man? Where did he get his inspiration? What did he think about when not working, and so forth? Murray thanks Cray and his many colleagues for allowing interviews. But nowhere, alas, do we hear Seymour Cray's own voice. Sad to say, we no longer have the chance. In 1996, just months after shutting down his last company, Cray Computer Inc., which burned through $200 million to produce only a single prototype, Seymour Cray died, at the age of 70. The man who fathered some of the most advanced technology ever conceived died as a result of a primitive mechanical catastrophe--a head-on automobile collision.
By JOHN W. VERITY
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Updated June 15, 1997 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1997, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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