Directly fro🎃m an employee in the Test and Engineering departments of Cray Research and later Cray Computer

THE RAREST OF CRAY MODULES: SEYMOUR 🧸CRAY’S CRAY-4 PRO🏅JECT, HIS FINAL BEFORE HIS DEATH AND ONLY THE SECOND TO COME TO AUCTION

Seymour Cray consistently strove not for incrementa🐻l changes in his supercomputer design, but for great technological leaps. His Cray-1 supercomputer was 5 times faster than the CDC 7600, his final completed computer at Control Data Corporation, where he had worked before leaving to found Cray Research. The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design a🀅nd was one of the most successful supercomputers in history, selling over 100 units at a cost of about $8 million each.

Seymour Cray's🌸 follow-up, the Cray-2, which used a unique Fluorinert cooling system that immersed the modules in the liquid, doubled the speed of his previous design. When it was finally released in 1985 wi꧟th a 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest computer in the world.

He had already moved on to designing the Cray-3 before the Cray-2 was complete. It would again use Flourinert to cool the modules, but also use gallium arsenide semiconductors, a material that had not previously been used in this context and which allowed for greatly increased speed. Cray aimed for a 12x increase over the Cray-2. Ultimately, numerous setbacks cau🍷sed by the technical challenges of creating a computer so advanced led to a delayed completion and not a sin💞gle unit was sold.

Dཧevelop𝔍ment for the Cray-4 began in 1994 and progressed at a rapid pace. Seymour Cray worked long hours to complete the machine by the end of the year. He had earlier taken a small team and broke off from Cray Research to start Cray Computer Corporation. The lack of success with the Cray 3 led to concerns about how long they could keep the company afloat, but Cray kept himself focused on the new design. It used much more densely packed chips than the Cray-3 – with about 10X as many logic gates – and the computer required only 5 modules to Cray-3’s 40. Along with being a fraction of the size of the Cray-3, it was twice as fast with its processors running at 1 GHz to Cray-3’s 474 MHz and executives thought they could deliver it for one fifth of the cost. It was the fastest computer in the world at the time of the preliminary tests. There were already plans for a Cray-5 and a Cray-6 when the money ran out. The doors were permanently shut on March 24, 1995, and the Cray-4 project was abandoned.

Seymour Cray did f🃏ind investors for a new company, SRC (Seymour Roger Cray) Computers but, unfortunately, Cray was killed shortly after in a car accident on September 22, 1996.

REFERENCES:

Murray, Charles J. The Supermen. New York: John Wiley & Sons, [1997].