A Seymour Cray Perspective

1/25/98


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Table of Contents

A Seymour Cray Perspective

Abstract

Cray 1925 -1996

Circuits and Packaging, Plumbing (bits and atoms) & Parallelism… plus Programming and Problems

Seymour Cray Computers

CDC: The Dawning era of Supercomputers

Cray Research Computers

Cray Computer Corp. Computers

Cray contributions

Cray Contribution

Cray Contributions

Cray attitudes

“Cray” Clock speed (Mhz), no. of processors, peak power (Mflops)

Time line of Cray designs and influence

Univac NTDS for U. S. Navy. Cray’s first computer

NTDS Univac CP 642 c1957

NTDS logic drawer 2”x2.5” cards

Control Data Corporation Little Character circuit test, CDC 160, CDC 1604

Little Character Circuit test for CDC 160/1604 6-bit

CDC 1604

CDC 1604 module

CDC 1604 module bay

CDC 1604 with console

CDC 160 12 bit word

The CDC 160 influenced DEC PDP-5 (1963), and PDP-8 (1965) 12-bit word minis

CDC 1604 The classic Accumulator Multiplier-Quotient; 6 B (index) register design. I/O transfers were block transferred via I/O assembly registers

Norris & Mullaney et al

CDC 3600 successor to 1604

CDC 6600 (and 7600)

CDC 6600 Installation

CDC 6600 operator’s console

CDC 6600 logic gates

CDC 6600 cooling in each bay

CDC 6600 Cordwood module

SDS 920 module 4 flip flops, 1 Mhz clock c1963

CDC 6600 modules in rack

CDC 6600 1Kbit core plane

CDC 1600 & 6600 logic & power densities

CDC 6600 block diagram

CDC 6600 registers

Dave Patterson… who coined the word, RISC

Blaauw -Brooks 6600 comments

John Mashey, MIPS Team (MIPS first commercial RISC outside of IBM)

Thomas Watson,IBM CEO 8/63

Cray’s response:

Effect on IBM: market & technical

CDC 6600

John Cocke

CDC 7600

CDC 7600s at Livermore

Butler Lampson

CDC 7600

CDC 7600 module slice

CDC 7600 12 bit core module

CDC 7600 block diagram

CDC 7600 registers

CDC 8600 Prototype

Cray Research… Cray 1

Cray 1 scalar vs vector perf. in clock ticks

CDC 7600 & Cray 1 at Livermore

Cray 1 #6 from LLNL. Located at The Computer Museum History Center, Moffett Field

Cray 1 150 Kw. MG set & heat exchanger

Cray 1 processor block diagram… see 6600

Steve Wallach, founder Convex

Cray XMP 4 vector Proc.

Cray, Cray 2 Proto, & Rollwagen

Cray 2

Cray Computer Corporation” Cray 3 and Cray 4 GaAs based computers

Cray 3 c1995 processor 500 MHz 32 modules 1K GaAs ic’s/module 8 proc.

Howard Sachs recollection working in Colorado Springs 1979 - 1982

Sachs comments

Sachs on Logic

Sachs

Petaflops by 2010

February 1994 Petaflops Workshop

Cray spoke at Jan. 1994 Petaflops Workshop

SRC Company Computer Cray’s Last Computer c1996-98

Joel Birnbaum, CTO HP

The End

Supercomputing Next Steps

Battle for speed through parallelism and massive parallelism

Parallel processing computer architectures will be in use by 1975.

In Dec. 1995 computers with 1,000 processors will do most of the scientific processing.

Bell Prize winners 1987-1997 (transition from ECL to CMOS vector and microprocessors)

PPT Slide

Is vector processor dead? Ratio of Vector processor to Microprocessor speed vs time

Is Vector Processor dead in 1997 for climate modeling?

Cray computers vs time

Jim Gray

Author: Gordon Bell

Email: gbell@microsoft.com

Home Page: http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell