My father worked for CDC at the time Cray was working on the 8600. Cray wasn't keeping HQ up to date as to how things were progressing. They were progressing very slowly. Norris sent my dad, who he knew was a laconic, hardheaded type like Cray, to take a field trip to Chippewa Falls to ask Cray how things were going. That was an inspired decision as Cray spilled the beans, the 8600 was unlikely to ever work due to cooling and reliability issues. Dad borrowed some of my facsimile paper, a paper coated with toxic but conductive metal powder. If you apply current to the paper you can do a crude analog simulation of heat flow. The flow lines didn't look promising. My dad brought the bad news back to Norris and he quickly wound down the 8600 project, and that prompted Seymour to leave CDC.
One minor correction to the video - The CRAY systems weren't C-shaped for cooling purposes, but rather to minimize the length of the backplane wires in order to reduce signal propagation delay. Cooling in the CRAY-1 and a few subsequent systems was provided by freon flowing through the vertical aluminum bars between the columns for the circuit boards, which were layered on both sides of heavy copper plates to conduct the heat from the circuit boards to the cold bars. Very elegant!
It was not Freon ... it was (I can't spell it) Florinert... you could dive in and breath it but could not come back out. And yes the "C" was for wiring length or the distance the electrons traveled ...
No, the cold bars *did* use freon (or at least a freon-like substance) . The Flourinert was only used in the immersion cooled systems like the CRAY-2 and was really expensive, like $500/gallon.
I met Mr. Cray when he was installing a Y-MP at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. I was a young Lieutenant and they actually used one of my finite element models as a benchmark.
I worked at the KAFB Weapons Lab from 1986 -1992 over in Bldg 617 on COIL. Seems like Wang was around our area too, but that was long ago and my hard drive has many missing sectors lol.
@@bobbys4327 very familiar with COIL. I worked on space-based laser vibration suppression in the four-trailer "quad" in the back parking lot from 85 to 89. We were there at the same time.
It's not at all surprising Warren Buffett declined to invest in a company that took a really smart guy to run it. Considering he has said he prefers companies that could be run by a ham sandwich.
@@mrdumbfellow927 Forget whether it was his colleague Charlie Munger or Peter Lynch who said it, but the other line was you prefer a business that could be run (profitably) by an idiot because sooner or later an idiot will run it.
I worked for Control Data in 1970, fresh out of University. I was smart in school but at Control Data I felt like being at the bottom of the ladder. There were a lot of genius people working there. Some were super passionate working 7 days a week, day and night.
I was in charge of software maintenance while Seymour was still the leader of Cray Research .. All the wires in the Cray were blue/white and the ladies that wired the system had to know exactly from and to for the connections ... it was mind-blowing how fast they were. Hardware people including engineers HATED software programmers ...
YES as a software engineer - we always argued with the hardware dept - how will we fix the problem in our system - a hardware change or a software patch? Always fixed it with software!! Remember, hardware is easy - it is software that is hard!!!
A few comments. 1) Read The Supermen, by Charles J. Murray, to get a complete history of the man and the companies. 2) Cray worked closely with Les Davis, an underappreciated engineer who worked a lot of the packaging magic that made Seymour's designs practical. 3) Cray's custom vector CPUs eventually became unaffordable to develop, while the high volume microprocessor industry was making considerable performance advancements with every new CMOS generation. In the end, the entire supercomputer industry, now generally known as the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry, came around to deploying enormous numbers of microprocessors in highly parallel architectures such as Cray's T3 family, often with custom accelerators and then GPU accelerators.
I just want to remind you that modern scalar CPU's do have vector instructions. They are usually referred as SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) and some of the popular examples are MMX, SSE, AVX, AltiVec, Neon...
And that's part of the stupid that contributed to the slow death of the company. (Remember, Job's bankrupted Apple several times like that. Form does not trump function, 'tho Mac purists bought whatever he crapped out.)
I am old enough to remember when Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. I also remember Silicon Graphics. I remember being in grade school and middle school seeing magazine covers with Cray computers featured on the front.
I worked there from 1984 to 1992 in sales and sales management. It was the best place I ever worked. Smart, compassionate, high integrity people, great products, and a wonderful work environment. Thanks for this video from a proud ex-Crayon.
One of the most amazing things about the Cray supercomputers were their processing geometry was very unusual. One of my professors giving me a history lecture about this devoted a full hour to the competing geometries.
Back then I was at university in the 1980's they had an Cray there. It was then 486 was the hot stuff for pc. Don't GPU's work a lot like vector computers I belie at least the older ones did.
@@magnemoe1 Actually it's modern GPUs that work a lot like Cray's geometry vectors. Old GPUs were a hardware implementation of fixed function geometry pipelines like OpenGL up to version 2.x and DirectX up to version 10. They were basically "a program made in hardware". Modern GPUs are SIMD devices. (SIMD = Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Or pretty much what Jon described as vectors. But they're also massively parallel with thousands of cores. So if you want to project a 3D scene onto a 2D plane (the screen) you're running the same tiny little program, with enormous amounts of geometry data as arguments, split up over thousands of cores. In the next frame the angle has changed only slightly, so the tiny little program (called a shader program) only have a few cos()/sin() values updated to reflect that, and the whole thing goes again. In addition to being able to work on the vertices of a 3D mesh modern GPUs can also work directly on the pixels in the 2D projection to adjust brightness, transparency, etc. This is why running computer graphics becomes more and more demanding as resolution increases. But it basically works the same: a very small program iterates over all the pixels, but to do that effectively long rows are loaded into wide registers in many cores. (Disclaimer to fellow nerds: This was purposefully kept incredibly superficial to the point of introducing slight inaccuracies)
@@careycummings9999 If we are being honest he could probably do a good Birdperson impersonation without much practice. He almost nailed it this time which is why it got a good snort and laugh out of me. I was like did he jus... he did....
I walk by one of these old round Cray-2s regularly at work. The plaque says they paid $19M for it (in the 80's), and it's something like 1/100 as powerful as an iPhone X.
@@blurglide How about Dave Cutler? He’ll get it running and do demos on his channel. He got an IBM mainframe recently. Great project, he got it up and operational.
Just the other day I saw a grandma driving around with a license plate that read CRAYTWO and I had to wonder if she worked with them in the past or if her last name was just Cray lol
@@leyasep5919 he saw a license plate which most probably was from a car he was driving himself. Try having a conversation with nearby cars in traffic. Maybe you're not in N. America and so this is not glaringly obvious. Do you know the children's game "Punch Buggy"?
Eniac wasn't the world's first programmable digital computer. The first was the UK's Colossus Mk1, which preceded Eniac by at least two years, being launched in 1943 to help with wartime codebreaking. The ever-modest Brits felt there was no need to shout about it, and its existence and history were kept secret until well into the 1970s.
Colossus was a special built machine designed for one job. Eniac was general purpose. It didn't have stored program but it could compute firing table or Nuclear weapons calculations.
Where does the computer built by John Atanasoff fit in the timeline of computer invention. His computer also preceded ENIAC but the credit had gone to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert for ENIAC first computer.
When I was taking CS in the 1980s, Cray was the ultimate of computing power.. Plus they really looked cool. They were used in CGI for the Last Starfighter.
I programmed a 6400, the 6600's kid brother which sacrificed parallelism for cheapness, for about 3 years, assembler of course, my second computer (first was an IBM 1620). What was most fascinating to me was how clean the instruction set was, how symmetrical and logical. I didn't really appreciate it for many years after working on others with much more dreadful instruction sets. I'm looking at you, x86, the ugliest instruction set I have ever worked with. Thornton (with Cray?) later wrote a book on the tricks which went into speeding up the 6600's instruction set, adding to my impression of how clean the 6x00 family was. The short description of the 6600's multiple processors is slightly misleading from being so short. It had one central processor with 64K (?) of 60-bit memory (60 is 5 columns on a punched card) which had zero I/O capability and no system mode; it was a pure user mode compute machine. There were around 10 PPUs (Peripheral Processing Units) with 4K 12-bit memory each, I think, but that's misleading too. There was really only one real PPU, and it switched context to each of the virtual PPUs in turn, I think every microsecond. Those PPUs did all the I/O to tape drives, card readers and punches, and ran all the system instructions which started and stopped the CPU and switched tasks. Each CPU task stored I/O requests in their location 0, and the PPUs monitored that, executing file I/O and transferring data to and from CPU memory. There was also extended core memory, 10 times as slow but 10 times as much, with special instructions to copy blocks back and forth.
I used to be an operator of the later Cyber series (a 72-26). The problem for the CPU + PPU architecture was that the rolling PPU could hang. It did this rather too often. That meant that regardless of the applications continuing in the central CPU, all the output was lost, the I/O being performed by the PPU. The Operating System had to be restarted. The other thing the Cray-designed CDC computers were limited by was the address bus - many applications spent most cycles swapping overlays rather than manipulating data. I recall the crystallography programs were right on the limit. Those running large dataset Geography applications ... went elsewhere in abject despair. The x86 may be ugly, but even the slow original IBM 8088 PC could address a more RAM. When using the 8087 the high-precision floating point was providing even more bits.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 Yes, the PC was a lot later. Nevertheless there were a few things about the IBM PC that seemed to me to change a lot about high-performance computing, as it had been. With a PC it was cheaper to have a little box in your office running difficult applications 24X7 - rather than battling for the limited time available on those old computers. It was not just in the realm of scientific computer. There was a person in the finance area at the uni who used a PC for end of year ledger reconciliation. Using a PC he managed over a weekend what took weeks of batch work on the mainframe. Unsurprisingly, he was the first person in the university administration to get an AT. I asked a fellow who used to work with crystallography on the old IBM 360/50 that preceded the Cyber, if he was moving to using PCs. But by then his career had moved into being a manager at the university, and he found no time to pursue his academic background. So I do not know if the crystallographers saw the transition the same way I did. I would expect that the ability to transition would depend on the availability of compilers, and the quality and capability of the complied code they produce. But I may be quite wrong in that expectation. IBM seemed to take this need for compilers a lot more to heart than Microsoft did.
My college Programming teacher worked for Cray. She still had her anti-static jacket with the Cray logo patch on it. I asked, and she gave it to me. I still have it. 🥰
@@TheOnlyDamien My PhD project was partially funded by the Ministry of Defence in the UK. It was related to numerical simulation (LES) of turbulent flows and pattern recognition of turbulent flow structures. At that time, the meteorological offices tried to use the Cray supercomputers to predict atmospheric turbulence and the numerical techniques known as Large Eddy Simulation (LES ) were developed in that era. Sorry very technical stuff! I used the Cray remotely on the ancient BBC Micro computers. The Cray YMP supercomputer was not hard to use, but the programming/debugging with the language Fortran 77 for the simulation source codes was a nightmare. At the time, I also used the massive ICL mainframe computers that filled up a big room in my university for post-data processing and analysis.
@@singhonlo67 That's genuinely so fucking cool thank you so much for sharing, and I appreciate the technical bits it's what we're here for after all. Thanks!
@@TheOnlyDamien funny, I also did my Masters thesis using a YMP (maybe it was XMP), it was extremely painful. You submitted your program during the day and received the results the next morning. .... in my case I mostly got the fun message: .....fatal error abort, sth like that. It took me forever to get it right. But I definitely enjoyed the comfort of a line editor. Who cares for those stupid punch cards :-)
The Cray II eventually was expanded to 8, then 16 processors originally designed with four. I worked for CRI as a Circuit Design Engineer for 5 years in Chippewa Falls. The Cray 3 was extremely hard to manufacture and that was it's Achilles heal. Eventually circuit density of CMOS displaced bipolar IC's. There were few of us at CRI that liked CMOS. The YMP series used bipolar gate arrays from Motorola. Seymour was eccentric he did not believe in SECDED nor did he believe in the damaging effects of ESD, which GAAS is extremely sensitive to. He also did not believe in using both edges of the clock edge, preferring to use only the rising edge of the clock to instigate operations. I always found that to be the most eccentric thing as it could have potentially doubled the speed. I was told that he did not trust the signal integrity of switching events based on the falling edge. I was originally hired as a Reliability Engineer at CRI and was appalled when I learned about that and lack of SECDED and ESD protection on his designs. After I left I found out that some younger engineers had plans to fit a highly integrated version of a 16 CPU Cray II into the size of a shoe box. The company was divested before that could happen.
Mostly true, but maybe a bit misleading. Cray 1 S/N 1 didn't have parity, but IIRC, S/N 3 did, as did all subsequent Cray machines, using a (72,64) SECDED code licensed from IBM. The Y-MP and its successors used an (80,64) S4ECD4ED code that could correct any single 4-bit error in the 80-bit code word. The Cray 2 and 3 also had SECDED memory. The original Cray 2 had 4 CPUs, but there were several 'q' machines that had only one. There was also a single Cray 2.5 sold that had 8 CPUs; it was nominally sold by Cray Computer Corp. to NASA. Bipolar logic is low-impedance, and doesn't suffer terribly from ESD. The Cray 3, however, used MESFETs (high-impedance devices) rather than bipolar logic, and was more sensitive.
I worked at Intel designing CPUs from 1980 through 2002. In the 80's we watched with interest the "supercomputer wars" which definitely influenced how we approached new processors. We didn't have enough area for large-scale parallelism but started by dedicating an unheard-of portion of the die to a Floating Point Unit. I designed that unit which was used in the 960 series, the 387 and eventually the 486. I was the design manager of the P6 (Pentium Pro/II) where we employed much more parallelism in addition to many techniques that had previously failed (out-of-order processing, speculative execution, register renaming, etc.). The Cray was always an inspiration, and in the late 90's we arrayed our processors and took the computing crown for a while. Interestingly, I knew the guys who started Ncube and even helped them fix their layout plots to avoid some fatal flaws. Those were heady times. We'[re now working on quantum systems, an even headier topic!
I worked for CDC in the late 70's. But my division wasn't the one with 6600's or other "super" computers. My group worked on the "Cyber 1000" unit which was a message processor. (See the Wikipedia "CDC Cyber" page for info). I worked on the Cyber 1000-2 version which added a bunch of Z80-based micros to service I/O. I wrote Z80 code for the "programmable line controller" card. While I worked there, I met some engineers on the C1000 itself. Here's a little oddity about it: The machine's assembler was written in Fortran. wtf? I never did find out why a person would code a Fortran compiler in raw machine language, and THEN write an assembler in Fortran. They all acted like it was normal and what was my problem anyway?
Steve Chen wasn't only let go because of financial issues, he couldn't ever call a design finished and was constantly tinkering to make the design better. The company got fed up of waiting for him to finish the Y-MP design and had to hand it to someone else to get it across the line. That was what the company told employees at the time, I was lucky enough to work for them between '88 and '95.
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Thank you for this video. It tells a great part of my life. It started with the CDC7000 at ETH in Zurich. We moved on to the Cray-1. We were so proud using the fastest computer in the world. My mentors Niklaus WIrth and C.A. Zehnder pushed me in a wonderful life. Being now an old guy, hacking on an overclocked Intel Chip, I happily look back on those outstanding machines,
When the Cray 2 came out, there was a joke going around: "Did you hear about the Cray 3?" "It's so fast it can execute an infinite loop in six seconds!"
Which was blindingly fast for the time, at 250 MHz (Cray 2). The Cray 3 was supposed to be 500 MHz, and actually ran at 480 MHz. The Cray 1 ran at 80 MHz; the Cray X-MPs ran at varied clock speeds between 80 MHz and 166 MHz, and Y-MPs at 166 up to 250 MHz. PCs crossed 1000 MHz (1 GHz) in the early 2000s.
My thoughts as well. Specifically, in the book it's mentioned they used the Cray X-MP to do the gene sequencing. I don't remember if tit actually appeared in the film, but you can see the distinctive cylindrical computer in the Jurassic Park videogame Trespasser inside one the former laboratory buildings.
In the movie they reproduced the front panel of a Connection Machine CM-5 after Cray Research Inc. declined to pay for the display of a Cray X-MP prop. In the Jurassic Park book, the supercomputer used for genomics is indeed a Cray X-MP.
In the mid/late 1980s while on a tour of a Bell Labs data center in New Jersey, I was allowed to stand in the center of the 3/4 circle of this Cray: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP ....A year later the final 1/4th of the circle was filled with a RAM disk.
I was born in 1956 and my dad was a software designer. Dad worked for several years at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids Iowa,. Authur Collins was trying to develop a mainframe computer to challenge IBM. Things went south in the early 1970's and the Collins "C System" computer bankrupted Collins Radio. In 1972 Collins faced failure or selling his company to North American Rockwell. Rockwell rescued Collins from bankruptcy and eliminated anything that wasn't profitable including the new Collins C-System which I understand was purchase by Control Data Corporation. I always wondered if some of dad's software made it into Control Data or Cray systems? Dad said at the time that the hardware and software that they had developed was years ahead of IBM. We were not allowed to say the name Collins in our house for many years after that......
Now the best thing out of Chippawa Falls, WI - Leinenkugel beer - of which I am drinking a toast to Mr. Cray and his work. Please celebrate responsibly.
It was a tradition for many years that every Cray delivered would also come with a case of Leinie's in the truck. Tradition carried through until at least the mid-2010s (Cray Inc)
Thanks for this. It brought back quite a few memories. I wrote my first program in 1966, and spent my working life in IT. Never was involved with supercomputers, but remember long days spent in looking for ways to reduce instruction path lengths in an airline reservations system on a Univac computer. What a joy it was to see 5 instructions knocked out of the path!
Everything he touches turns to gold and all he wants to do is build the best supercomputer but keeps getting distracted having to deal with selling the gold XD
Well, not totally true. The 8600 never quite worked, the 7600 barely worked and was naggingly unreliable and incompatible, the Cray 2 was a dead end design, and the Cray 3 barely worked for a second or two at a time. Cray pushed things righe bloody limit so there were a lot of very shaky machines made.
The great thing that the GPU companies did (NVidia and ATI, which later merged into AMD) was similar to what Cray did with scientific computing: they identified a small community with large compute budgets that were willing to write their own software on machines that were massively redesigned every generation. For GPUs, this was game designers. These folks didn't actually have large hardware budgets of their own, but their customers were collectively willing to spend many billions of dollars a year on graphics hardware. The total number of software titles that had to run on each generation was around a hundred, and NVidia and ATI developed close relationships with the folks doing that work. And crucially, they let the CPU handle most of the complexity in a way that was backward compatible, so that in each generation it was a small part of the software (the kernels) that had to be ported to the next GPU. Eventually, NVidia took an open-source software project, GPGPU, and turned it into CUDA, which wraps the GPU in a software layer that is somewhat forward- and backward-compatible. CUDA made it possible for a lot more people to write code that partially runs on the GPU, because they didn't need to learn as much and they didn't need as much individual support from NVidia. So I'd disagree with your summary. In years past, the GPU folks defined a space in which they did quite a bit of from-scratch redesign each generation. However, they've also been dragged down by their own success. Now that they have so many customers doing so many things with GPUs, they have a requirement for forward- and backward-compatibility that restricts some of their innovation. Recent generations have been able to run code for prior generations fairly well, as the architecture has stayed similar enough and just the sizes of various memories and numbers of SMs and cores has increased. To get full performance though, programmers still have to retune their code for each generation. NVidia in particular learned an important lesson along the way. They made a ton of money for a few years when cryptocurrencies moved from computing the blockchains on CPUs to GPUs. NVidia was unsure how long blockchains would be a cash cow, and was unwilling to throw away graphics performance to get better blockchain performance. Their run came to a halt when crypto folks moved to FPGAs, which didn't last long before the crypto folks moved to full custom silicon. So when the AI folks moved their code the GPUs, NVidia decided to support them with products tuned just for their workloads. They forked their product line and introduced new products which are scaled way up for AI workloads. It is unlikely that mainstream graphics processors in the near term will have larger caches or memories, for instance, than the H100, and so code tuned for the H100 is unlikely to run well at all on regular GPUs for perhaps a decade. H100s also have inter-GPU communication channels which completely outstrip the PCIe connections on mainstream GPUs. As well as pushing up the cache sizes, they pushed hard on packaging. An H100 burns 700 watts, far more than high-end professional GPUs (right now the RTX 4090, which uses a total of 450 watts including the memory chips). The H100 has six stacks of HBM memory on a silicon substrate, a scheme that gives it 3 TB/s of memory bandwidth to 80 GB, compared to 1 TB/s to 24 GB that the 4090 gets from 24 discrete GDDR6 memory chips on its printed circuit board. NVidia is competing with several companies making from-scratch NPUs, including Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook, as well as a slew of startups. As the GPUs have a significant amount of hardware that is unused in AI (texture caches and MPEG decoders?), these from-scratch designs have some basic advantages. It'll be interesting to see if NVidia is willing to make a product which gives up software compatibility to keep up with all these new entrants. NVidia certainly has the capital to fund multiple chip design teams, but they may be unwilling to partition their best design team.
I was at Purdue in 1980. They still had a 6600 and 2 6200s. I wrote assembly code on the 6600 which was radically different from the assembly code I wrote on IBM 360s. Purdue also had a Cyber 205 which proved to be a bit of a disappointment. Most of the compute was used for large X-ray crystallography calculations which allowed Purdue be the first University to image a virus.
Oof I respect that Cray ethos, like academic research and releasing state of the art technology making just enough money to pay your way but not sacrificing perfection for profit
Awesome walk through history! I started my career out of college at the EPA's NESC working for Martin Marietta where we installed and managed a Cray Y-MP for the EPA. We upgraded to a Cray C90-4 and also installed a Cray MPP (I don't recall the exact model) it was good and exciting times.
Fascinating background. I actually walked by a Cray-1 computer when I was sent to a Ross Perot company, Electronic Data Systems in TX, to install a tape library system (Grau). I think it was in the mid-1990's. As I recall, EDS provided Geo-data for the DoD. The example given was transmitting cartography data of a middle-east battle field from the US to a tank in the field in "near real time".
Good overview. Minor points... There was substantial conflict between the STAR group and Cray as they were both competing for development dollars. Additionally, there were some personal issues between Jim Thorton (Star) and Cray going back to the 6600 days. Complicating the STAR development where to keep the STAR as a product, government requirements dictated that scalar and byte operations be supported. The additional instruction control logic and impacts to register and memory control add physical space between the memory and Instruction Control areas. I'm ex-CDC and worked on 6600, 7600 and STAR systems hardware and software.
Oh, been a while since I've been recommended one of your vids. TH-cam just full-on stopped one day. Guess it's time to turn on the bell. Thanks for the high quality videos as always!
You answered some questions I've had for years. I came from USAF analog computing in the late '60s, took CS night classes in the early '80s, and got a job monitoring AT&T-UNIX minicomputers from '85 until I retired in 2007. The only time I ever worked with main frames was in school in the early '80s. Never saw a supercomputer so there were a lot of unanswered questions. For example, some of the old gear we maintained actually still used core memory in the '80s. Storage was on 200MB and 300MB drives the size of a small 'fridge, however every system was for a dedicated app. There were no multi-processor operations. This led to some unusual configs some of which were very similar to the tech Cray used. I find that very fascinating. Thanks for answering so many of my questions.
I arrived at the U of Minnesota when the main computing resource was A CDC 1604. The installation of a 6600 at the Lauderdale facility was undeerway that year, and I wound up writing software that took advantage of its innovations. I actually have a couple of the "cordwoord" logic modules. Who needs more than 64 characters? We used every one of those 60 bits, lots of shifting and masking.
My 6600 and 7600 manuals are out of reach right now, but my memory is that they had pack and unpack instructions meant for floating point which could be repurposed to deal with 6-bit characters. But that was too long ago to remember for sure.
You didn’t mention the Cray Business Systems Division which built a SPARC based multiprocessor system called the CS6400. Sun Microsystems eventually bought the division from SGI and immediately made a huge splash in the large UNIX systems market. This came at a crucial time because PCs had begun to encroach on Sun’s traditional workstation business. The acquisition occurred just as the Internet boom started.
1987 the Sun-4 was the first SPARC system, arrived with a VME bus and packaged the same as Sun's top-of-the-line Motorola-based Sun-3 servers. The SPARCstation 1, rated at 12.5 MIPS, 1.4 MFLOPS, 3 times faster than the Sun-3 it replaced. Smashed all competition in desktops, competitors still waiting on volumes of Motorola's 68040, to upgrade 68030. However, 68040 took so long arriving, forcing workstation oem's to ship old models with promise of free upgrades. Innovative, SPARCstation 1 was the first computer to implement an upgradable SBus interface. 10Base-2 Ethernet Controller, SCSI-SNS Host Adapter, Parallel Port, and 8-Channel Serial Controllers some of the SBus interfaces, all products you could only purchase from one company, Antares Microsystems. It was a good idea then, as initially, it worked without the chance of an anti-trust violation! 1996 Sun paid out for the SPARC business side of Cray Research, with Cray Systems being all that she wants, out of Silicon Graphics. Products, technologies and its customer base from the wildly named, "SuperServer" 6400. Sun's big launch with a killer family of products, their Ultra Enterprise servers, had configurations up to 30 x 64-bit CPU's, 30 x SBus channels. Each an internal Gigaplane I/O of 2.5 Gb/Sec, set standards and established Sun as leader in Unix roles, and data centre servers for Oracle's RDBMS. Sadly, in Sun's launch of the anticipated JavaStation, MicroSPARC Network PC, priced under US $1,000, looking like doing big things, was lost to noise from Intel, Apple and bigger players, with deeper pockets and longer arms, Sun had made a simple mistake, overreached. Lucky for none, same time, DEC wiped any shine left off SPARC. DEC Alpha's performance, saw Intel pick 'em up, rinse 'em n mince 'em, dumped on the supercomputing highway. Their unions birth, an unholy love child named, "IA64" and Itanium, pricey mistakes Intel wants us to forget. Now a period defined as "unstable" existed, database King Oracle, seen perhaps as their finest witness, virtues and miracles of Sun Microsystems. Mac Daddy of the DB land, had both Sun's hardware, optimised for Solaris OS, physical hardware and middleware operating system, enabling Larry Ellison, the licencing king of all dings of the lings, Mr Megabucks making off with Pro-C enabled Oracle financials, proved a cocaine cartel of cash counting, he could sell to infinity, and beyond.. World's leader etc etc.. dwarfing scales.. Sybase (Microsoft SQL / BI chosen license) left few if any competitors, gone open source or to the wall, only its a joke not funny, when broke with no money, the Sun could shine no more, and all that made such a bright SPARC, went dark in a flash, from lack of the cash.
I worked for Burroughs computer company for a while. At the time, if you asked the average person for the name of a computer company, they would all say IBM. If you asked to name another, if they could do it at all it would be Univac. When Burroughs bought Sperry-Univac to form Unisys company, they dropped the Univac name - a bonehead marketing move if there ever was one! In the 1970s, a Burroughs medium system mainframe computer filled a large room and cost a million dollars. The central processor had a fraction of the computer speed and memory capacity of my cell phone, but there were also a flock of independent I/O processors to handle things like disc and tape drives and communication with user data terminals. A lot of people could enter business or other information at once as fast as they could type, so the system operated very efficiently.
Back in the very early '80s I operated the Cray-1 #1. I was at the UKAEA in the UK and we had ordered a Cray-1s but had a very long wait time for it to be built and delivered, so Cray loaned us the Cray-1 #1 while ours was being built.
The vector explanation at 21 minutes in inaccurate. In the Cray 1, vector instructions could issue a new result every clock cycle and the adder pipe is 3 cycles long once the opporands have been fetched so the actual time samings is closer to 80 cycles reduced to 25 or 26 rather than 80 reduced to 4.
I'd love to hear the story of Silicon Graphics Inc. Such an influential company during its time, and the companies that ended up spun out of its former employees still exist. Looking at you Jensen!
In the late 90s/early 00s, I was a contractor on a large Air Force base, and inside the main building (which used to be a massive aircraft hangar... I worked in a large concrete building INSIDE this hangar), there was one hallway that had the husk of a Cray. It was mainly there as a kind of display piece/bench. It was in the hallway that led to the bowling alley. That was awesome.
In the mid-80s I got a tour of NASA Ames' computer facilities (thanks Eugene Maya!) where they had both a Cray-1 and a Cray-2. Better yet they had a Cray technician that could answer all our questions. Amazing that such different machines came sequentially from the mind of the same man.
I was a user of CDC 6600 & 7600 systems from 1975-78. I’d say the one thing it was deficient in was the software side. The native FTN Fortran compiler produced very fast running code, but you couldn’t figure what went wrong if the code crashed. To develop software we used a Fortran compiler from the university of Minnesota called MNF which gave good diagnostics, but wasn’t as fast. When you were happy the code worked you then ported the code to FTN!
I worked at Bell Labs as an MTS 1982-4. I got my Fortran programs working on the IBM and then transferred them to the Cray-1. The Cray made it possible for me to develop matrix spectral factorization methods for solving otherwise impossible-to-solve queuing system problems.
Almost all of the "old" supercomputer companies are part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Convex, SGI, Cray, DEC, Tandem, and all the others these companies had scooped up before being acquired by HPE.
I’d argue that’s not a good thing, they tend to die there, speaking from experience as one at a former HPE company that managed to escape their ownership. The PTSD from the HPE days is still quite palpable, even coming up on a decade after divestiture. I can’t imagine what the customer experience is like now, I was a Cray customer during the Cray, Inc. days, nothing good seems to come from HPE.
@@c1ph3rpunk As a former Hewlett Packard employee from when Bill and Dave, though retired, were still around, I'd agree with that. A succession of dysfunctional boards did for the company, not least by appointing the Wicked Witch.
@@v8pilot oh yea, her. It must have been an amazing place back in the day, was before my time, I entered the industry around ‘93. I’m still a huge fan of HP test equipment, own a decent amount of it and if given the choice, I’ll pick vintage HP over nearly anything else. Even non-functional I’ll take it, there’s a massive chance it can be repaired.
This may be true for some divisions, but the HPC group (mostly cray people) is doing fine. Still making great products, including multiple top 10 and top 100 supercomputers.
Great overview! In the mid-'90's, I was fortunate to have NOAA and NIST as customers for my employer's network cable plant design practice. It's a bit hazy thirty years on, but I was at NOAA (I believe) in Boulder awaiting approval to enter their supercomputer machine room and sat on their original Cray-1 in the waiting area -- reduced from supercomputer to literally a lobby bench. Once I was approved to enter the machine room, the first thing I was greeted with was the infamous Cray-3 Tank (shown in this video), which used a massive amount of liquid freon as a very cold liquid bath for some of the processors or memory interfaces (unsure which). The Tank looked like an aquarium with thousands of very thin wires swaying in the continuous flow of freon from one end of the tank to the other, very much like anemones would look in an aquarium. I was only able to spend that single day in the machine room, but it definitely left an impression on me. I had no idea that Cray himself lived in Boulder, which I'm assuming is why a high-profile customer like NOAA had either a prototype of the Cray-3 or, as stated in this piece, the single Cray-3 that had been sold. Regardless, those were very heady times for computer and software development. From a geeky perspective, it was an honor to spend just a few minutes with a couple of Cray's legendary machines, even just as a casual observer.
Cray was astounding in his creativity and vision. I really appreciate the work put into making this video. Thank you. On a side note. I would wonder as mentioned, people upgrading from one Cray to the next would have to rewrite their software. A Computer in itself is a very expensive boat anchor without software to run it. While it's not a flashy topic, I'd love to know a bit about who wrote the compilers and documentation for these very different machines. They would have to start working on it as soon as Cray finished defining the ISA so the software was ready for customers to rewrite their software to or implement new software. Like the ray tracing software used to make that music video.
Tremendous video...I was a graduate student at the time and was interested in minicomputers, PCs from the likes of DEC (PDP 8 bits), Data General (16 bits...wow!) for interfacing to laboratory instruments...I think DEC published three books at the time about how to program the PDP 8 in assembly language, but you had to master two of them to understand the third...in all permutations of the three.
It's worth noting that Cray (as part of HPE) is still doing pretty well, with 4 out of the top 10 supercomputers in most recent TOP500. The systems are generally using third party processors in giant clusters but connectivity and cooling are still the secret sauces.
I owned a few Silicon Graphics computers with the Cray name attached to them, Like the SGI O2, Origin 2000 and the Onyx 2. Those were the days of backaches and headaches. Thank you for the video, it was awesome!
I interned at a DOE lab back in 2018. They had instructions for a lot of their software to be compiled on Cray computers, but I had no idea how old Cray computers really were.
Great video. Seymour Cray was a fascinating individual, but you kinda underplayed the full extent of his eccentricities. In his free time, his favorite hobby was...digging. He would dig tunnels for hours on end, and claimed to have had conversations with elves while doing so. I've often thought it may have been his way of dealing with possible PTSD from his combat experience in WWII.
Back in the early 80's all of the issues Cray faced with pipelining and parallelism were known. Lots of progress has been made, there is still a long way to go. This was a trip through my years at college studying computer science back in the early to mid 1980's.
Well done! Always interesting to look back on amazing history of computers. I vaguely remember Control Data making 5.25” floppy disks in the 80s as I had a Commodore 64 and a friend had an Apple II and the games we played were all on disk and we had blue disk sleeves with CD logo on them. Maybe it was some other company as don’t see anything when search
From Cray's Wikipedia entry: 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."
Cray was a whimsical man, too. When asked what tools he uses to design supercomputers, he was very specific: a 2B pencil. Anything harder or softer simply didn't leave the most desireable lines. When someone pointed out that Apple used a Cray to design the Macintosh, Cray said he is using a Macintosh to design the next Cray.
Thank you for your historical videos! This one has a special place in my heart. As a Saint Paul resident and child of a former Control Data employee, all of this is new to me. I had no idea that Cray supercomputers had a local connection or that they were essentially spun out of CDC.
You should take a day trip to the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology. About 2/3 of the exhibit is Cray-related stuff including a CDC 7600 and all sorts of Cray machines and memorabilia. Also, from about 2010 til 2016 (IIRC) Cray had a large office in downtown SP and the husk that is now owned by HPE is now in MoA.
The needs of customers to do as little rewrites as possible paves the way for Intel and Microsoft to rise with their backwards compatibility, and that streak has been going on for 40 years now.
Asianometry and Summoning Salt are the two for me... thing is Asianometry cranks out two videos a week and often about things I've not thought about or about things I deeply love and either way I'm here for it. Summoning Salt is one every few months. Less a reply and more of an inspired by reply to engage the algorithm.
I had the privilege of working at sites that held ser. no. 1 and 2 of the CDC1604 connected to the USN. One was fleet Operational Command Center Hawaii and The Naval postgraduate School in Monterey CA. When I retired in 2003 NPS Monterey had a Mini-cray. Thanks for this video.
That was really engaging. I got into computers (proper) in the very early 1980s so a lot of this was still raw. How things have changed but I always wondered what became of Cray. And now I know. Thank you.
Great content! In 1990s, I was in Japan and witnessed the intense competition on the development of supercomputers. I once used Cray YMP and impressed by the user friendly compiler, with which I was able to learn fundamental of vectorization and (shared memory) parallelization. It is a pity that vector processor based HPC system completely died given that fundamental factor making GPU suitable for HPC is multiplicity of memory bank (basically the same idea). I still remember that the head of Earth Simulator project, Dr. Miyoshi, jokingly told me that maybe we need to start making game machines to justify development of vector chip based HPC system.
Thanks for this my Uncle Joseph Walsh worked with Control Data during these years, I don't know much about it and wish he was still with us. He certainly made out very well and went on to sit on the boards of many companies.
Thank you. Once again, an excellent informative and entertaining clip. [edit] I read back in the day, that they were all about vector math. Nobody ever explained to me Why that was a thing. It makes a whole lot more sense now.
I went to Control Data Institute in Dallas........... a fine tech school for 1 year, programming. Worked on Univac 9300, System 3, and up to AS400 I Series !!!! It was awesome.
Cray engineers did not seem to be too happy when Cray was acquired by HPE, right before the pandemic. I sat in a few meetings with them, and you could hear the disapproval in their voices as we discussed the implementation of HPE’s hardware architecture inside the next “Cray” computer. Luckily, I was able to escape HPE before it turned into a complete Shiite show where everybody’s salary was cut. Layoffs were announced after salaries were cut. Those that weren’t laid off starting jumping ship to AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Lenovo, etc.
The info about the early shares in cdc being sold on the street and creating a local boom in wealth likely creating an entire district of a city out of it is super cool and interesting insight into the idea of a stock market
I was a programmer out of school in 1974. I worked at CDC. They gave me a chance to work on the 7600. When I heard that the market was about 20, I thought no, I want a job with lots of market locations. I eventually worked on intelligent terminals then medical real time micros as the Twin Cities lost mainframe business and replaced it with medical devices(Medtronics).
You took me down a pleasant memory lane. In 1968 I was a freshman engineering student at the University of Texas in Austin and I saw their CDC 6600 through the glass windows tended by the high priests. I didn't realize it was considered a supercomputer at the time. Engineering classes with computer programming projects used that computer with our programs read in from punched cards we had to punch ourselves, oh the memories! Results usually came back in seconds after the card reader finished reading the card "deck". Good memories. Thanks.
My father worked for CDC at the time Cray was working on the 8600. Cray wasn't keeping HQ up to date as to how things were progressing. They were progressing very slowly. Norris sent my dad, who he knew was a laconic, hardheaded type like Cray, to take a field trip to Chippewa Falls to ask Cray how things were going. That was an inspired decision as Cray spilled the beans, the 8600 was unlikely to ever work due to cooling and reliability issues.
Dad borrowed some of my facsimile paper, a paper coated with toxic but conductive metal powder. If you apply current to the paper you can do a crude analog simulation of heat flow. The flow lines didn't look promising.
My dad brought the bad news back to Norris and he quickly wound down the 8600 project, and that prompted Seymour to leave CDC.
This is what ypu come to the comments section for.
One minor correction to the video - The CRAY systems weren't C-shaped for cooling purposes, but rather to minimize the length of the backplane wires in order to reduce signal propagation delay. Cooling in the CRAY-1 and a few subsequent systems was provided by freon flowing through the vertical aluminum bars between the columns for the circuit boards, which were layered on both sides of heavy copper plates to conduct the heat from the circuit boards to the cold bars. Very elegant!
Yeah. A circular shape is very good for keeping connection distances short. A spherical shape is best, but that's usually impractical.
The 'cold bar and cool plates was used on the 6600s and 7600s, too. (ex-CDC)
It was not Freon ... it was (I can't spell it) Florinert... you could dive in and breath it but could not come back out. And yes the "C" was for wiring length or the distance the electrons traveled ...
No, the cold bars *did* use freon (or at least a freon-like substance) . The Flourinert was only used in the immersion cooled systems like the CRAY-2 and was really expensive, like $500/gallon.
@@joesterling4299 If they could have made it spherical they would have. I believe Seymour was even quoted as saying that.
I met Mr. Cray when he was installing a Y-MP at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. I was a young Lieutenant and they actually used one of my finite element models as a benchmark.
Genius and people skills seem to be a common theme in history.
I worked at the KAFB Weapons Lab from 1986 -1992 over in Bldg 617 on COIL. Seems like Wang was around our area too, but that was long ago and my hard drive has many missing sectors lol.
@@bobbys4327 very familiar with COIL. I worked on space-based laser vibration suppression in the four-trailer "quad" in the back parking lot from 85 to 89. We were there at the same time.
It's not at all surprising Warren Buffett declined to invest in a company that took a really smart guy to run it. Considering he has said he prefers companies that could be run by a ham sandwich.
And still profitable.
Well you never know when someone will eventually hire a ham sandwich in a suit and tie to run it into the ground......
@@mrdumbfellow927 Forget whether it was his colleague Charlie Munger or Peter Lynch who said it, but the other line was you prefer a business that could be run (profitably) by an idiot because sooner or later an idiot will run it.
@@mrdumbfellow927 this is what they call in the industry controlled flight into terrain. Where is NASA would put it, just piling it straight on in
Not much energy is needed to Hurd sheep.
I worked for Control Data in 1970, fresh out of University. I was smart in school but at Control Data I felt like being at the bottom of the ladder. There were a lot of genius people working there. Some were super passionate working 7 days a week, day and night.
I was in charge of software maintenance while Seymour was still the leader of Cray Research .. All the wires in the Cray were blue/white and the ladies that wired the system had to know exactly from and to for the connections ... it was mind-blowing how fast they were. Hardware people including engineers HATED software programmers ...
YES as a software engineer - we always argued with the hardware dept - how will we fix the problem in our system - a hardware change or a software patch? Always fixed it with software!! Remember, hardware is easy - it is software that is hard!!!
@@denniss1211 Even in the post-SGI occupation era, software thought hardware existed only to serve them and vice-versa.
Cray's naming scheme doomed the company. While people would buy a Cray-X or a Cray-Y computer, no one would buy a Cray-Z computer...
Just like how preperations A thru G were a complete failure, until PREPERATION H!!
Well. apple sold an IPhone 4S. so I don't know about that 😄
Well Acorn had a tough choice with explaining ARM abbreviation with "RISC Machine" to the board representatives...
Sounds Cray Cray…
A few comments. 1) Read The Supermen, by Charles J. Murray, to get a complete history of the man and the companies. 2) Cray worked closely with Les Davis, an underappreciated engineer who worked a lot of the packaging magic that made Seymour's designs practical. 3) Cray's custom vector CPUs eventually became unaffordable to develop, while the high volume microprocessor industry was making considerable performance advancements with every new CMOS generation. In the end, the entire supercomputer industry, now generally known as the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry, came around to deploying enormous numbers of microprocessors in highly parallel architectures such as Cray's T3 family, often with custom accelerators and then GPU accelerators.
I just want to remind you that modern scalar CPU's do have vector instructions. They are usually referred as SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) and some of the popular examples are MMX, SSE, AVX, AltiVec, Neon...
@@user-jp7tw3sd3x Yep, and GPUs take the SIMD idea even further.
And NPUs take it even further still.
The Cray-1 was not just the best super computer of the day, but it was also Art.
Who is Art?
And that's part of the stupid that contributed to the slow death of the company. (Remember, Job's bankrupted Apple several times like that. Form does not trump function, 'tho Mac purists bought whatever he crapped out.)
It's also the only computer intended to be sat on. Very warm and comfy.
hear hear
Cray was cray-cray in his time. At 11:00 it costs 100K (10M today) for a 0.2MHz beast. Midboggling.
I am old enough to remember when Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. I also remember Silicon Graphics. I remember being in grade school and middle school seeing magazine covers with Cray computers featured on the front.
RIP BYTE magazine ❤
@@SavageBits BYTE reminds me of the movie "Weird Science". Almost all the covers looked like they could be from that movie.
Well now Cray and SGI are HPE and we still sell systems under the Cray name.
I worked there from 1984 to 1992 in sales and sales management. It was the best place I ever worked. Smart, compassionate, high integrity people, great products, and a wonderful work environment. Thanks for this video from a proud ex-Crayon.
One of the most amazing things about the Cray supercomputers were their processing geometry was very unusual. One of my professors giving me a history lecture about this devoted a full hour to the competing geometries.
Back then I was at university in the 1980's they had an Cray there. It was then 486 was the hot stuff for pc.
Don't GPU's work a lot like vector computers I belie at least the older ones did.
@@magnemoe1 Actually it's modern GPUs that work a lot like Cray's geometry vectors. Old GPUs were a hardware implementation of fixed function geometry pipelines like OpenGL up to version 2.x and DirectX up to version 10. They were basically "a program made in hardware".
Modern GPUs are SIMD devices. (SIMD = Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Or pretty much what Jon described as vectors. But they're also massively parallel with thousands of cores. So if you want to project a 3D scene onto a 2D plane (the screen) you're running the same tiny little program, with enormous amounts of geometry data as arguments, split up over thousands of cores. In the next frame the angle has changed only slightly, so the tiny little program (called a shader program) only have a few cos()/sin() values updated to reflect that, and the whole thing goes again.
In addition to being able to work on the vertices of a 3D mesh modern GPUs can also work directly on the pixels in the 2D projection to adjust brightness, transparency, etc. This is why running computer graphics becomes more and more demanding as resolution increases. But it basically works the same: a very small program iterates over all the pixels, but to do that effectively long rows are loaded into wide registers in many cores.
(Disclaimer to fellow nerds: This was purposefully kept incredibly superficial to the point of introducing slight inaccuracies)
Yep vector processing with an 8 instruction stack of 64 bits/instruction. I wrote a program to sort the instructions by priority ..
"Which in bird culture is considered a dick move" You got me with that one.
Throwing in a Rick & Morty & Birdperson quote. I see what you did there.
@@careycummings9999 If we are being honest he could probably do a good Birdperson impersonation without much practice. He almost nailed it this time which is why it got a good snort and laugh out of me. I was like did he jus... he did....
this was the comment I was looking for.
😃
I walk by one of these old round Cray-2s regularly at work. The plaque says they paid $19M for it (in the 80's), and it's something like 1/100 as powerful as an iPhone X.
Are they going to decommission it? I’m looking…
@@waynesworldofsci-tech The thing hasn't been used in decades, but it'll never be for sale unless perhaps a museum wants it.
@@blurglide
How about Dave Cutler? He’ll get it running and do demos on his channel. He got an IBM mainframe recently. Great project, he got it up and operational.
@@blurglide
I don’t know Dave personally, but my guess is he’d love to have a Cray. And he’d put it to good use as an educational tool.
> and it's something like 1/3 as powerful as an iPhone X
honestly that's impressive still.
Just the other day I saw a grandma driving around with a license plate that read CRAYTWO and I had to wonder if she worked with them in the past or if her last name was just Cray lol
If only you had asked.
That’s cray-cray!
@@leyasep5919 he saw a license plate which most probably was from a car he was driving himself. Try having a conversation with nearby cars in traffic. Maybe you're not in N. America and so this is not glaringly obvious. Do you know the children's game "Punch Buggy"?
If it was in Wisco it was probably his 2nd wife.
@@e·lu·ci·date If it's what I think you're thinking, that would be Utah.
Eniac wasn't the world's first programmable digital computer. The first was the UK's Colossus Mk1, which preceded Eniac by at least two years, being launched in 1943 to help with wartime codebreaking. The ever-modest Brits felt there was no need to shout about it, and its existence and history were kept secret until well into the 1970s.
Colossus was a special built machine designed for one job. Eniac was general purpose. It didn't have stored program but it could compute firing table or Nuclear weapons calculations.
Where does the computer built by John Atanasoff fit in the timeline of computer invention. His computer also preceded ENIAC but the credit had gone to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert for ENIAC first computer.
Actually, it was Konrad Zuse's Z3, which was operational in 1938
When I was taking CS in the 1980s, Cray was the ultimate of computing power.. Plus they really looked cool. They were used in CGI for the Last Starfighter.
That was what I commented, too. I don't know why Cray computer became well known in that movie!
And was used for the CGI for the Disney “Body Wars” ride.
I programmed a 6400, the 6600's kid brother which sacrificed parallelism for cheapness, for about 3 years, assembler of course, my second computer (first was an IBM 1620). What was most fascinating to me was how clean the instruction set was, how symmetrical and logical. I didn't really appreciate it for many years after working on others with much more dreadful instruction sets. I'm looking at you, x86, the ugliest instruction set I have ever worked with.
Thornton (with Cray?) later wrote a book on the tricks which went into speeding up the 6600's instruction set, adding to my impression of how clean the 6x00 family was.
The short description of the 6600's multiple processors is slightly misleading from being so short. It had one central processor with 64K (?) of 60-bit memory (60 is 5 columns on a punched card) which had zero I/O capability and no system mode; it was a pure user mode compute machine. There were around 10 PPUs (Peripheral Processing Units) with 4K 12-bit memory each, I think, but that's misleading too. There was really only one real PPU, and it switched context to each of the virtual PPUs in turn, I think every microsecond. Those PPUs did all the I/O to tape drives, card readers and punches, and ran all the system instructions which started and stopped the CPU and switched tasks. Each CPU task stored I/O requests in their location 0, and the PPUs monitored that, executing file I/O and transferring data to and from CPU memory.
There was also extended core memory, 10 times as slow but 10 times as much, with special instructions to copy blocks back and forth.
I too was appalled at the ugliness of the x86. Not to forget the flakiness of Windows.
As I hold a $200 1TB microSD card in my hand, it’s almost unimaginable to me how far we’ve come since punch cards in what, 60 years? 😨
I used to be an operator of the later Cyber series (a 72-26). The problem for the CPU + PPU architecture was that the rolling PPU could hang. It did this rather too often. That meant that regardless of the applications continuing in the central CPU, all the output was lost, the I/O being performed by the PPU. The Operating System had to be restarted.
The other thing the Cray-designed CDC computers were limited by was the address bus - many applications spent most cycles swapping overlays rather than manipulating data. I recall the crystallography programs were right on the limit. Those running large dataset Geography applications ... went elsewhere in abject despair.
The x86 may be ugly, but even the slow original IBM 8088 PC could address a more RAM. When using the 8087 the high-precision floating point was providing even more bits.
@@John.0z That's all true, but the 8088 was 15 years later.
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 Yes, the PC was a lot later. Nevertheless there were a few things about the IBM PC that seemed to me to change a lot about high-performance computing, as it had been.
With a PC it was cheaper to have a little box in your office running difficult applications 24X7 - rather than battling for the limited time available on those old computers. It was not just in the realm of scientific computer.
There was a person in the finance area at the uni who used a PC for end of year ledger reconciliation. Using a PC he managed over a weekend what took weeks of batch work on the mainframe. Unsurprisingly, he was the first person in the university administration to get an AT.
I asked a fellow who used to work with crystallography on the old IBM 360/50 that preceded the Cyber, if he was moving to using PCs. But by then his career had moved into being a manager at the university, and he found no time to pursue his academic background. So I do not know if the crystallographers saw the transition the same way I did.
I would expect that the ability to transition would depend on the availability of compilers, and the quality and capability of the complied code they produce. But I may be quite wrong in that expectation. IBM seemed to take this need for compilers a lot more to heart than Microsoft did.
The photos of the Eckert-Mauchly tag and the Cray-1 memory are my photos of my computer parts. I'm glad to see them used.
keep going bro. 2 years later or so, i'm still finding every video of yours FASCINATING. 😄
beautiful. i remember the Cray from my early childhood, the first "supercomputer" back then. :) thank you! 😍
My college Programming teacher worked for Cray. She still had her anti-static jacket with the Cray logo patch on it. I asked, and she gave it to me. I still have it. 🥰
I used the Cray YMP at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for my PhD project 1989-1990.
What was your PHD project on if you don't mind saying of course? I find that so fascinating, was it hard to use/learn?
@@TheOnlyDamien My PhD project was partially funded by the Ministry of Defence in the UK. It was related to numerical simulation (LES) of turbulent flows and pattern recognition of turbulent flow structures. At that time, the meteorological offices tried to use the Cray supercomputers to predict atmospheric turbulence and the numerical techniques known as Large Eddy Simulation (LES ) were developed in that era. Sorry very technical stuff! I used the Cray remotely on the ancient BBC Micro computers. The Cray YMP supercomputer was not hard to use, but the programming/debugging with the language Fortran 77 for the simulation source codes was a nightmare. At the time, I also used the massive ICL mainframe computers that filled up a big room in my university for post-data processing and analysis.
@@singhonlo67 That's genuinely so fucking cool thank you so much for sharing, and I appreciate the technical bits it's what we're here for after all. Thanks!
@@TheOnlyDamien funny, I also did my Masters thesis using a YMP (maybe it was XMP), it was extremely painful. You submitted your program during the day and received the results the next morning. .... in my case I mostly got the fun message: .....fatal error abort, sth like that. It took me forever to get it right.
But I definitely enjoyed the comfort of a line editor. Who cares for those stupid punch cards :-)
@@singhonlo67 i STILL listen to old BBC Shipping Forecasts for nostalgic purposes. A few parodies are rather funny.
As a man with a 3d printed model of the Cray 2 on his desk, I got excited when I saw this video.
As a gal with a chip and piece of pcb from a Cray 1 on her desk, I need to know where to get the model to 3d print...
That sounds like some exciting desk art you have😂
A computer that was art as well as functional.
@@marcwolf60 And seated twelve comfortably besides.
The Cray II eventually was expanded to 8, then 16 processors originally designed with four. I worked for CRI as a Circuit Design Engineer for 5 years in Chippewa Falls. The Cray 3 was extremely hard to manufacture and that was it's Achilles heal. Eventually circuit density of CMOS displaced bipolar IC's. There were few of us at CRI that liked CMOS. The YMP series used bipolar gate arrays from Motorola. Seymour was eccentric he did not believe in SECDED nor did he believe in the damaging effects of ESD, which GAAS is extremely sensitive to. He also did not believe in using both edges of the clock edge, preferring to use only the rising edge of the clock to instigate operations. I always found that to be the most eccentric thing as it could have potentially doubled the speed. I was told that he did not trust the signal integrity of switching events based on the falling edge. I was originally hired as a Reliability Engineer at CRI and was appalled when I learned about that and lack of SECDED and ESD protection on his designs. After I left I found out that some younger engineers had plans to fit a highly integrated version of a 16 CPU Cray II into the size of a shoe box. The company was divested before that could happen.
Yep .. Seymour said "parity was for farmers" not fast computing.
Mostly true, but maybe a bit misleading. Cray 1 S/N 1 didn't have parity, but IIRC, S/N 3 did, as did all subsequent Cray machines, using a (72,64) SECDED code licensed from IBM. The Y-MP and its successors used an (80,64) S4ECD4ED code that could correct any single 4-bit error in the 80-bit code word. The Cray 2 and 3 also had SECDED memory.
The original Cray 2 had 4 CPUs, but there were several 'q' machines that had only one. There was also a single Cray 2.5 sold that had 8 CPUs; it was nominally sold by Cray Computer Corp. to NASA.
Bipolar logic is low-impedance, and doesn't suffer terribly from ESD. The Cray 3, however, used MESFETs (high-impedance devices) rather than bipolar logic, and was more sensitive.
I worked at Intel designing CPUs from 1980 through 2002. In the 80's we watched with interest the "supercomputer wars" which definitely influenced how we approached new processors. We didn't have enough area for large-scale parallelism but started by dedicating an unheard-of portion of the die to a Floating Point Unit. I designed that unit which was used in the 960 series, the 387 and eventually the 486. I was the design manager of the P6 (Pentium Pro/II) where we employed much more parallelism in addition to many techniques that had previously failed (out-of-order processing, speculative execution, register renaming, etc.). The Cray was always an inspiration, and in the late 90's we arrayed our processors and took the computing crown for a while. Interestingly, I knew the guys who started Ncube and even helped them fix their layout plots to avoid some fatal flaws. Those were heady times. We'[re now working on quantum systems, an even headier topic!
I worked for CDC in the late 70's. But my division wasn't the one with 6600's or other "super" computers. My group worked on the "Cyber 1000" unit which was a message processor. (See the Wikipedia "CDC Cyber" page for info). I worked on the Cyber 1000-2 version which added a bunch of Z80-based micros to service I/O. I wrote Z80 code for the "programmable line controller" card.
While I worked there, I met some engineers on the C1000 itself. Here's a little oddity about it: The machine's assembler was written in Fortran. wtf? I never did find out why a person would code a Fortran compiler in raw machine language, and THEN write an assembler in Fortran. They all acted like it was normal and what was my problem anyway?
Thanks! For a trip down memory lane during my days at Sperry Univac///Lockheed Martin…
Steve Chen wasn't only let go because of financial issues, he couldn't ever call a design finished and was constantly tinkering to make the design better. The company got fed up of waiting for him to finish the Y-MP design and had to hand it to someone else to get it across the line. That was what the company told employees at the time, I was lucky enough to work for them between '88 and '95.
Thank you for this video. It tells a great part of my life.
It started with the CDC7000 at ETH in Zurich.
We moved on to the Cray-1.
We were so proud using the fastest computer in the world.
My mentors Niklaus WIrth and C.A. Zehnder pushed me in a wonderful life.
Being now an old guy, hacking on an overclocked Intel Chip, I happily look back on those outstanding machines,
When the Cray 2 came out, there was a joke going around: "Did you hear about the Cray 3?"
"It's so fast it can execute an infinite loop in six seconds!"
And it was so fast you need to say HALT twice 😂
Which was blindingly fast for the time, at 250 MHz (Cray 2). The Cray 3 was supposed to be 500 MHz, and actually ran at 480 MHz. The Cray 1 ran at 80 MHz; the Cray X-MPs ran at varied clock speeds between 80 MHz and 166 MHz, and Y-MPs at 166 up to 250 MHz. PCs crossed 1000 MHz (1 GHz) in the early 2000s.
Fun Fact: the CDSI Arden Hills building now sits on the Campus of Boston Scientific in Arden Hills, Minnesota.
This always reminds me of reading Jurassic Park where they used a Cray to sequence dino DNA
My thoughts as well. Specifically, in the book it's mentioned they used the Cray X-MP to do the gene sequencing. I don't remember if tit actually appeared in the film, but you can see the distinctive cylindrical computer in the Jurassic Park videogame Trespasser inside one the former laboratory buildings.
SGI's influence at the time?
In the movie they reproduced the front panel of a Connection Machine CM-5 after Cray Research Inc. declined to pay for the display of a Cray X-MP prop. In the Jurassic Park book, the supercomputer used for genomics is indeed a Cray X-MP.
In the mid/late 1980s while on a tour of a Bell Labs data center in New Jersey, I was allowed to stand in the center of the 3/4 circle of this Cray: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP ....A year later the final 1/4th of the circle was filled with a RAM disk.
I was born in 1956 and my dad was a software designer. Dad worked for several years at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids Iowa,. Authur Collins was trying to develop a mainframe computer to challenge IBM. Things went south in the early 1970's and the Collins "C System" computer bankrupted Collins Radio. In 1972 Collins faced failure or selling his company to North American Rockwell. Rockwell rescued Collins from bankruptcy and eliminated anything that wasn't profitable including the new Collins C-System which I understand was purchase by Control Data Corporation. I always wondered if some of dad's software made it into Control Data or Cray systems? Dad said at the time that the hardware and software that they had developed was years ahead of IBM. We were not allowed to say the name Collins in our house for many years after that......
Now the best thing out of Chippawa Falls, WI - Leinenkugel beer - of which I am drinking a toast to Mr. Cray and his work. Please celebrate responsibly.
It was a tradition for many years that every Cray delivered would also come with a case of Leinie's in the truck. Tradition carried through until at least the mid-2010s (Cray Inc)
Thanks for this. It brought back quite a few memories. I wrote my first program in 1966, and spent my working life in IT. Never was involved with supercomputers, but remember long days spent in looking for ways to reduce instruction path lengths in an airline reservations system on a Univac computer. What a joy it was to see 5 instructions knocked out of the path!
Everything he touches turns to gold and all he wants to do is build the best supercomputer but keeps getting distracted having to deal with selling the gold XD
Well, not totally true. The 8600 never quite worked, the 7600 barely worked and was naggingly unreliable and incompatible, the Cray 2 was a dead end design, and the Cray 3 barely worked for a second or two at a time. Cray pushed things righe bloody limit so there were a lot of very shaky machines made.
The great thing that the GPU companies did (NVidia and ATI, which later merged into AMD) was similar to what Cray did with scientific computing: they identified a small community with large compute budgets that were willing to write their own software on machines that were massively redesigned every generation.
For GPUs, this was game designers. These folks didn't actually have large hardware budgets of their own, but their customers were collectively willing to spend many billions of dollars a year on graphics hardware. The total number of software titles that had to run on each generation was around a hundred, and NVidia and ATI developed close relationships with the folks doing that work. And crucially, they let the CPU handle most of the complexity in a way that was backward compatible, so that in each generation it was a small part of the software (the kernels) that had to be ported to the next GPU.
Eventually, NVidia took an open-source software project, GPGPU, and turned it into CUDA, which wraps the GPU in a software layer that is somewhat forward- and backward-compatible. CUDA made it possible for a lot more people to write code that partially runs on the GPU, because they didn't need to learn as much and they didn't need as much individual support from NVidia.
So I'd disagree with your summary. In years past, the GPU folks defined a space in which they did quite a bit of from-scratch redesign each generation. However, they've also been dragged down by their own success. Now that they have so many customers doing so many things with GPUs, they have a requirement for forward- and backward-compatibility that restricts some of their innovation. Recent generations have been able to run code for prior generations fairly well, as the architecture has stayed similar enough and just the sizes of various memories and numbers of SMs and cores has increased. To get full performance though, programmers still have to retune their code for each generation.
NVidia in particular learned an important lesson along the way. They made a ton of money for a few years when cryptocurrencies moved from computing the blockchains on CPUs to GPUs. NVidia was unsure how long blockchains would be a cash cow, and was unwilling to throw away graphics performance to get better blockchain performance. Their run came to a halt when crypto folks moved to FPGAs, which didn't last long before the crypto folks moved to full custom silicon.
So when the AI folks moved their code the GPUs, NVidia decided to support them with products tuned just for their workloads.
They forked their product line and introduced new products which are scaled way up for AI workloads. It is unlikely that mainstream graphics processors in the near term will have larger caches or memories, for instance, than the H100, and so code tuned for the H100 is unlikely to run well at all on regular GPUs for perhaps a decade. H100s also have inter-GPU communication channels which completely outstrip the PCIe connections on mainstream GPUs.
As well as pushing up the cache sizes, they pushed hard on packaging. An H100 burns 700 watts, far more than high-end professional GPUs (right now the RTX 4090, which uses a total of 450 watts including the memory chips). The H100 has six stacks of HBM memory on a silicon substrate, a scheme that gives it 3 TB/s of memory bandwidth to 80 GB, compared to 1 TB/s to 24 GB that the 4090 gets from 24 discrete GDDR6 memory chips on its printed circuit board.
NVidia is competing with several companies making from-scratch NPUs, including Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook, as well as a slew of startups. As the GPUs have a significant amount of hardware that is unused in AI (texture caches and MPEG decoders?), these from-scratch designs have some basic advantages. It'll be interesting to see if NVidia is willing to make a product which gives up software compatibility to keep up with all these new entrants. NVidia certainly has the capital to fund multiple chip design teams, but they may be unwilling to partition their best design team.
I was at Purdue in 1980. They still had a 6600 and 2 6200s. I wrote assembly code on the 6600 which was radically different from the assembly code I wrote on IBM 360s. Purdue also had a Cyber 205 which proved to be a bit of a disappointment. Most of the compute was used for large X-ray crystallography calculations which allowed Purdue be the first University to image a virus.
Oof I respect that Cray ethos, like academic research and releasing state of the art technology making just enough money to pay your way but not sacrificing perfection for profit
Except history shows economic matter.
Then you don't know how to survive
Awesome walk through history! I started my career out of college at the EPA's NESC working for Martin Marietta where we installed and managed a Cray Y-MP for the EPA. We upgraded to a Cray C90-4 and also installed a Cray MPP (I don't recall the exact model) it was good and exciting times.
Wonderful Video : I lived through this era & looked forward to working on supercomputers in the 1990s.
Some amazing things going on back then !
Fascinating background. I actually walked by a Cray-1 computer when I was sent to a Ross Perot company, Electronic Data Systems in TX, to install a tape library system (Grau). I think it was in the mid-1990's. As I recall, EDS provided Geo-data for the DoD. The example given was transmitting cartography data of a middle-east battle field from the US to a tank in the field in "near real time".
Good overview. Minor points... There was substantial conflict between the STAR group and Cray as they were both competing for development dollars. Additionally, there were some personal issues between Jim Thorton (Star) and Cray going back to the 6600 days. Complicating the STAR development where to keep the STAR as a product, government requirements dictated that scalar and byte operations be supported. The additional instruction control logic and impacts to register and memory control add physical space between the memory and Instruction Control areas. I'm ex-CDC and worked on 6600, 7600 and STAR systems hardware and software.
Oh, been a while since I've been recommended one of your vids. TH-cam just full-on stopped one day. Guess it's time to turn on the bell. Thanks for the high quality videos as always!
You answered some questions I've had for years. I came from USAF analog computing in the late '60s, took CS night classes in the early '80s, and got a job monitoring AT&T-UNIX minicomputers from '85 until I retired in 2007.
The only time I ever worked with main frames was in school in the early '80s. Never saw a supercomputer so there were a lot of unanswered questions.
For example, some of the old gear we maintained actually still used core memory in the '80s. Storage was on 200MB and 300MB drives the size of a small 'fridge, however every system was for a dedicated app. There were no multi-processor operations.
This led to some unusual configs some of which were very similar to the tech Cray used. I find that very fascinating. Thanks for answering so many of my questions.
I was and still am proud to have worked for Cray Research, Inc. VM Station!
I arrived at the U of Minnesota when the main computing resource was A CDC 1604. The installation of a 6600 at the Lauderdale facility was undeerway that year, and I wound up writing software that took advantage of its innovations. I actually have a couple of the "cordwoord" logic modules. Who needs more than 64 characters? We used every one of those 60 bits, lots of shifting and masking.
My 6600 and 7600 manuals are out of reach right now, but my memory is that they had pack and unpack instructions meant for floating point which could be repurposed to deal with 6-bit characters. But that was too long ago to remember for sure.
You didn’t mention the Cray Business Systems Division which built a SPARC based multiprocessor system called the CS6400. Sun Microsystems eventually bought the division from SGI and immediately made a huge splash in the large UNIX systems market. This came at a crucial time because PCs had begun to encroach on Sun’s traditional workstation business. The acquisition occurred just as the Internet boom started.
1987 the Sun-4 was the first SPARC system, arrived with a VME bus and packaged the same as Sun's top-of-the-line Motorola-based Sun-3 servers. The SPARCstation 1, rated at 12.5 MIPS, 1.4 MFLOPS, 3 times faster than the Sun-3 it replaced. Smashed all competition in desktops, competitors still waiting on volumes of Motorola's 68040, to upgrade 68030. However, 68040 took so long arriving, forcing workstation oem's to ship old models with promise of free upgrades. Innovative, SPARCstation 1 was the first computer to implement an upgradable SBus interface. 10Base-2 Ethernet Controller, SCSI-SNS Host Adapter, Parallel Port, and 8-Channel Serial Controllers some of the SBus interfaces, all products you could only purchase from one company, Antares Microsystems. It was a good idea then, as initially, it worked without the chance of an anti-trust violation!
1996 Sun paid out for the SPARC business side of Cray Research, with Cray Systems being all that she wants, out of Silicon Graphics. Products, technologies and its customer base from the wildly named, "SuperServer" 6400. Sun's big launch with a killer family of products, their Ultra Enterprise servers, had configurations up to 30 x 64-bit CPU's, 30 x SBus channels. Each an internal Gigaplane I/O of 2.5 Gb/Sec, set standards and established Sun as leader in Unix roles, and data centre servers for Oracle's RDBMS. Sadly, in Sun's launch of the anticipated JavaStation, MicroSPARC Network PC, priced under US $1,000, looking like doing big things, was lost to noise from Intel, Apple and bigger players, with deeper pockets and longer arms, Sun had made a simple mistake, overreached.
Lucky for none, same time, DEC wiped any shine left off SPARC. DEC Alpha's performance, saw Intel pick 'em up, rinse 'em n mince 'em, dumped on the supercomputing highway. Their unions birth, an unholy love child named, "IA64" and Itanium, pricey mistakes Intel wants us to forget. Now a period defined as "unstable" existed, database King Oracle, seen perhaps as their finest witness, virtues and miracles of Sun Microsystems. Mac Daddy of the DB land, had both Sun's hardware, optimised for Solaris OS, physical hardware and middleware operating system, enabling Larry Ellison, the licencing king of all dings of the lings, Mr Megabucks making off with Pro-C enabled Oracle financials, proved a cocaine cartel of cash counting, he could sell to infinity, and beyond.. World's leader etc etc.. dwarfing scales.. Sybase (Microsoft SQL / BI chosen license) left few if any competitors, gone open source or to the wall, only its a joke not funny, when broke with no money, the Sun could shine no more, and all that made such a bright SPARC, went dark in a flash, from lack of the cash.
Yep they built the sun e10k and the 15/25k systems. Based in San Diego. I ran the project that beta tested their systems
I worked for Burroughs computer company for a while. At the time, if you asked the average person for the name of a computer company, they would all say IBM. If you asked to name another, if they could do it at all it would be Univac. When Burroughs bought Sperry-Univac to form Unisys company, they dropped the Univac name - a bonehead marketing move if there ever was one! In the 1970s, a Burroughs medium system mainframe computer filled a large room and cost a million dollars. The central processor had a fraction of the computer speed and memory capacity of my cell phone, but there were also a flock of independent I/O processors to handle things like disc and tape drives and communication with user data terminals. A lot of people could enter business or other information at once as fast as they could type, so the system operated very efficiently.
What a wonderful journey and having worked in Cray/Silicon Graphics, brings me fond memories of all these sites. Awesome work.
Back in the very early '80s I operated the Cray-1 #1. I was at the UKAEA in the UK and we had ordered a Cray-1s but had a very long wait time for it to be built and delivered, so Cray loaned us the Cray-1 #1 while ours was being built.
An article on the NSA website about Cray and his work for the agency suggests 100 of 6600 models were sold
Fascinating history, with the right amount of technical details. Thanks, mate!
The vector explanation at 21 minutes in inaccurate. In the Cray 1, vector instructions could issue a new result every clock cycle and the adder pipe is 3 cycles long once the opporands have been fetched so the actual time samings is closer to 80 cycles reduced to 25 or 26 rather than 80 reduced to 4.
Thanks for another great video. Seymour Cray was my inspiration in the '80s.
I'd love to hear the story of Silicon Graphics Inc. Such an influential company during its time, and the companies that ended up spun out of its former employees still exist. Looking at you Jensen!
Great video! I thoroughly recommend reading The Supermen, a book about Cray and his band of merry men. It's a fascinating story.
In the late 90s/early 00s, I was a contractor on a large Air Force base, and inside the main building (which used to be a massive aircraft hangar... I worked in a large concrete building INSIDE this hangar), there was one hallway that had the husk of a Cray. It was mainly there as a kind of display piece/bench. It was in the hallway that led to the bowling alley. That was awesome.
Hah, Warren Buffett, what a fool!
In the mid-80s I got a tour of NASA Ames' computer facilities (thanks Eugene Maya!) where they had both a Cray-1 and a Cray-2. Better yet they had a Cray technician that could answer all our questions. Amazing that such different machines came sequentially from the mind of the same man.
I was a user of CDC 6600 & 7600 systems from 1975-78. I’d say the one thing it was deficient in was the software side. The native FTN Fortran compiler produced very fast running code, but you couldn’t figure what went wrong if the code crashed. To develop software we used a Fortran compiler from the university of Minnesota called MNF which gave good diagnostics, but wasn’t as fast. When you were happy the code worked you then ported the code to FTN!
I worked at Bell Labs as an MTS 1982-4. I got my Fortran programs working on the IBM and then transferred them to the Cray-1. The Cray made it possible for me to develop matrix spectral factorization methods for solving otherwise impossible-to-solve queuing system problems.
I did Fortran on a 6400 and a Cyber 70/74 and I eventually learned how to read the core dump.
Almost all of the "old" supercomputer companies are part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Convex, SGI, Cray, DEC, Tandem, and all the others these companies had scooped up before being acquired by HPE.
I’d argue that’s not a good thing, they tend to die there, speaking from experience as one at a former HPE company that managed to escape their ownership. The PTSD from the HPE days is still quite palpable, even coming up on a decade after divestiture. I can’t imagine what the customer experience is like now, I was a Cray customer during the Cray, Inc. days, nothing good seems to come from HPE.
@@c1ph3rpunk As a former Hewlett Packard employee from when Bill and Dave, though retired, were still around, I'd agree with that. A succession of dysfunctional boards did for the company, not least by appointing the Wicked Witch.
@@v8pilot oh yea, her. It must have been an amazing place back in the day, was before my time, I entered the industry around ‘93.
I’m still a huge fan of HP test equipment, own a decent amount of it and if given the choice, I’ll pick vintage HP over nearly anything else. Even non-functional I’ll take it, there’s a massive chance it can be repaired.
This may be true for some divisions, but the HPC group (mostly cray people) is doing fine. Still making great products, including multiple top 10 and top 100 supercomputers.
This is an excellent episode, brings back some fond memories ❤
Great overview! In the mid-'90's, I was fortunate to have NOAA and NIST as customers for my employer's network cable plant design practice. It's a bit hazy thirty years on, but I was at NOAA (I believe) in Boulder awaiting approval to enter their supercomputer machine room and sat on their original Cray-1 in the waiting area -- reduced from supercomputer to literally a lobby bench. Once I was approved to enter the machine room, the first thing I was greeted with was the infamous Cray-3 Tank (shown in this video), which used a massive amount of liquid freon as a very cold liquid bath for some of the processors or memory interfaces (unsure which). The Tank looked like an aquarium with thousands of very thin wires swaying in the continuous flow of freon from one end of the tank to the other, very much like anemones would look in an aquarium. I was only able to spend that single day in the machine room, but it definitely left an impression on me.
I had no idea that Cray himself lived in Boulder, which I'm assuming is why a high-profile customer like NOAA had either a prototype of the Cray-3 or, as stated in this piece, the single Cray-3 that had been sold. Regardless, those were very heady times for computer and software development. From a geeky perspective, it was an honor to spend just a few minutes with a couple of Cray's legendary machines, even just as a casual observer.
Lots of hard work to make this video .... Thank You !
Cray was astounding in his creativity and vision. I really appreciate the work put into making this video. Thank you. On a side note. I would wonder as mentioned, people upgrading from one Cray to the next would have to rewrite their software. A Computer in itself is a very expensive boat anchor without software to run it. While it's not a flashy topic, I'd love to know a bit about who wrote the compilers and documentation for these very different machines. They would have to start working on it as soon as Cray finished defining the ISA so the software was ready for customers to rewrite their software to or implement new software. Like the ray tracing software used to make that music video.
Tremendous video...I was a graduate student at the time and was interested in minicomputers, PCs from the likes of DEC (PDP 8 bits), Data General (16 bits...wow!) for interfacing to laboratory instruments...I think DEC published three books at the time about how to program the PDP 8 in assembly language, but you had to master two of them to understand the third...in all permutations of the three.
It's worth noting that Cray (as part of HPE) is still doing pretty well, with 4 out of the top 10 supercomputers in most recent TOP500. The systems are generally using third party processors in giant clusters but connectivity and cooling are still the secret sauces.
I owned a few Silicon Graphics computers with the Cray name attached to them, Like the SGI O2, Origin 2000 and the Onyx 2. Those were the days of backaches and headaches. Thank you for the video, it was awesome!
SGI Files Patent Infringement Suit Against NVIDIA, April 17, 1998.
SGI graphics team moves to Nvidia, August 10, 1999.
Didn’t take long...
I had the opportunity to use a couple of those SGI machines back in the day. Good hardware, and IRIX was a decent Unix implementation.
I interned at a DOE lab back in 2018. They had instructions for a lot of their software to be compiled on Cray computers, but I had no idea how old Cray computers really were.
Great video. Seymour Cray was a fascinating individual, but you kinda underplayed the full extent of his eccentricities. In his free time, his favorite hobby was...digging. He would dig tunnels for hours on end, and claimed to have had conversations with elves while doing so. I've often thought it may have been his way of dealing with possible PTSD from his combat experience in WWII.
Back in the early 80's all of the issues Cray faced with pipelining and parallelism were known. Lots of progress has been made, there is still a long way to go. This was a trip through my years at college studying computer science back in the early to mid 1980's.
Well done! Always interesting to look back on amazing history of computers.
I vaguely remember Control Data making 5.25” floppy disks in the 80s as I had a Commodore 64 and a friend had an Apple II and the games we played were all on disk and we had blue disk sleeves with CD logo on them. Maybe it was some other company as don’t see anything when search
From Cray's Wikipedia entry:
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."
Cray was a whimsical man, too. When asked what tools he uses to design supercomputers, he was very specific: a 2B pencil. Anything harder or softer simply didn't leave the most desireable lines. When someone pointed out that Apple used a Cray to design the Macintosh, Cray said he is using a Macintosh to design the next Cray.
Thank you for your historical videos!
This one has a special place in my heart. As a Saint Paul resident and child of a former Control Data employee, all of this is new to me. I had no idea that Cray supercomputers had a local connection or that they were essentially spun out of CDC.
You should take a day trip to the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology. About 2/3 of the exhibit is Cray-related stuff including a CDC 7600 and all sorts of Cray machines and memorabilia. Also, from about 2010 til 2016 (IIRC) Cray had a large office in downtown SP and the husk that is now owned by HPE is now in MoA.
@@ajlitt001There are many former Cray facilities around the Twin Cities.
@@dtj7995 Yep. I interviewed when they were in Mendota Heights, visited the SP office often, and left shortly after they moved to MoA.
Oh man this video brings back memories of a time long passed.
Wahoo, learn so much on Cray with your video, impressive again !
Fascinating account!
Great work, as usual!
Love the Computer History Museum - spent a whole day there and basically got kicked out at close. Got the 1401 visitors printout as well
Very interesting video. I remember reading about Bray and his computers in the electronics journals of the period.
Mad respect for Cray. He was an artist of computing.
The needs of customers to do as little rewrites as possible paves the way for Intel and Microsoft to rise with their backwards compatibility, and that streak has been going on for 40 years now.
babe wake up new Asianometry just dropped
and it's Cray-zee !
Asianometry and Summoning Salt are the two for me... thing is Asianometry cranks out two videos a week and often about things I've not thought about or about things I deeply love and either way I'm here for it. Summoning Salt is one every few months. Less a reply and more of an inspired by reply to engage the algorithm.
@@leyasep5919 - It's cray-cray as the young'uns say it nowadays. lol
Amazing. I remember the cray name and happy you explained the history. Thank you.
I had the privilege of working at sites that held ser. no. 1 and 2 of the CDC1604 connected to the USN. One was fleet Operational Command Center Hawaii and The Naval postgraduate School in Monterey CA. When I retired in 2003 NPS Monterey had a Mini-cray. Thanks for this video.
That was really engaging. I got into computers (proper) in the very early 1980s so a lot of this was still raw. How things have changed but I always wondered what became of Cray. And now I know. Thank you.
Great content! In 1990s, I was in Japan and witnessed the intense competition on the development of supercomputers. I once used Cray YMP and impressed by the user friendly compiler, with which I was able to learn fundamental of vectorization and (shared memory) parallelization. It is a pity that vector processor based HPC system completely died given that fundamental factor making GPU suitable for HPC is multiplicity of memory bank (basically the same idea). I still remember that the head of Earth Simulator project, Dr. Miyoshi, jokingly told me that maybe we need to start making game machines to justify development of vector chip based HPC system.
Great presentation. Love your work.
Thanks for this my Uncle Joseph Walsh worked with Control Data during these years, I don't know much about it and wish he was still with us. He certainly made out very well and went on to sit on the boards of many companies.
To this day, the Cray-1 is the most badass-looking computer ever made
Ehh Thinking Machines CM-5 or SGI Origin 2000 128proc?
Very well done article. Loved it.
Thank you. Once again, an excellent informative and entertaining clip.
[edit] I read back in the day, that they were all about vector math. Nobody ever explained to me Why that was a thing. It makes a whole lot more sense now.
Around time stamp 8:35 -- "Decliners included a guy named Warren Buffet. ... Bet he's poor now and deeply regrets it." 🤣
I went to Control Data Institute in Dallas........... a fine tech school for 1 year, programming. Worked on Univac 9300, System 3, and up to AS400 I Series !!!! It was awesome.
Cray engineers did not seem to be too happy when Cray was acquired by HPE, right before the pandemic. I sat in a few meetings with them, and you could hear the disapproval in their voices as we discussed the implementation of HPE’s hardware architecture inside the next “Cray” computer. Luckily, I was able to escape HPE before it turned into a complete Shiite show where everybody’s salary was cut. Layoffs were announced after salaries were cut. Those that weren’t laid off starting jumping ship to AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Lenovo, etc.
The info about the early shares in cdc being sold on the street and creating a local boom in wealth likely creating an entire district of a city out of it is super cool and interesting insight into the idea of a stock market
I was a programmer out of school in 1974. I worked at CDC. They gave me a chance to work on the 7600. When I heard that the market was about 20, I thought no, I want a job with lots of market locations. I eventually worked on intelligent terminals then medical real time micros as the Twin Cities lost mainframe business and replaced it with medical devices(Medtronics).
You took me down a pleasant memory lane. In 1968 I was a freshman engineering student at the University of Texas in Austin and I saw their CDC 6600 through the glass windows tended by the high priests. I didn't realize it was considered a supercomputer at the time. Engineering classes with computer programming projects used that computer with our programs read in from punched cards we had to punch ourselves, oh the memories! Results usually came back in seconds after the card reader finished reading the card "deck". Good memories. Thanks.
I drooled over the T3E behind that window when I was a student at UT, then got the chance to help install an XC40 in that same room 20 years later.
Last time I was this early I was programming a Cray T90, which I did in the 90s.