Origins: Seymour Cray and the Dawn of Supercomputing (1950s-1972)
The foundations of supercomputing trace back to the 1950s when American electrical engineer and computing pioneer Seymour Cray joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA). At ERA, he helped design the ERA 1103, one of the world‘s first commercially successful scientific computers.
In 1958, Cray began working at Control Data Corporation (CDC) where he improved upon the ERA 1103 to create the CDC 1604. But his big breakthrough emerged in 1964: the legendary CDC 6600 supercomputer. Powered by innovative features like pipelining and parallelism, it achieved awe-inspiring speeds up to 3 megaflops – making it the world‘s fastest computer for 5+ years.
The CDC 6600 smashed performance records as the fastest computer of its time.
Buoyed by the success, Seymour Cray left CDC in 1972 to found his own company dedicated to pushing the frontiers of high-performance computing: Cray Research Inc. The goal was clear – build the next generation of cutting-edge supercomputers for solving complex scientific and defense research challenges.
Forging the Supercomputing Industry: The Dominant Cray Era (1976-1980s)
Staying true to its mission, Cray Research wasted no time in releasing its pioneering CRAY-1 system in 1976. Clocking speeds up to 80 MHz, it leveraged innovative new architecture backed by Cray‘s custom design philosophy focused on maximizing computational speed.
The results were groundbreaking. With peak performance of 160 megaflops, the CRAY-1 took over as the world‘s fastest computer – a title previously held by CDC‘s earlier 7600 model. And despite its steep $5-$8 million price tag, over 80 CRAY-1 supercomputers were sold in under a decade.
The Cray-1 completely revolutionized supercomputing when released in 1976.
But Cray Research was just getting warmed up. It continued ushering era-defining achievements throughout the 70s and 80s across different models:
1982 – Cray releases the 1 GHz Cray X-MP, featuring flexible 2 to 4 processors. This made it one of the first supercomputers with parallel processing for enhanced performance.
1985 – The 1.9 gigaflops Cray-2 set the new computational speed benchmark. It also pioneered direct immersion cooling technology, enabling more reliable functioning.
1988 – The Cray Y-MP raises the parallel processing stakes with its groundbreaking 8 processor configuration.
In just over a decade, Cray Research had fueled a Cambrian explosion in high-performance computing. By leveraging Seymour Cray‘s innovative engineering and design brilliance, it produced a series of industry-leading supercomputers. Each one set new records for speed as computational metrics vaulted from megaflops to gigaflops.
Cray‘s meteoric rise also firmly entrenched supercomputing technology into national research and defense infrastructure. As computational horsepower accelerated, Cray systems tackled everything from complex physics simulations to classified nuclear and intelligence projects. This cemented its reputation as the dominant force in the booming supercomputing industry it helped launch.
The Quest for New Frontiers: Cray‘s Push into Commercialization (1990s)
With Moore‘s law in full swing through the 90s, Cray looked to expand its market by targeting commercial customers as well – beyond traditional scientific users.
This led to 1991‘s rollout of the Cray C90 series – configurable 6-16 processor behemoths focused on business analytics and enterprise data warehousing workloads. The C90 marked Cray‘s first major vector multiprocessor supercomputer and became a commercial success.
Cray also led the push into parallel microprocessors to bolster speed and energy efficiency for commercial usage models:
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1993 – Released the Cray T3D, optimized for computational fluid dynamics and 3D modeling/simulations leveraging up to 2,048 microprocessors.
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1995 – Its successor, the Cray T90, breached the teraflops barrier with peak performance hitting 1.2 teraflops. This giant leap emphatically confirmed the parallel computing route for achieving new milestones.
With innovative microprocessor-driven design, 1993‘s T3D sparked a new generation of supercomputers.
By pivoting towards enterprise and leverage parallelization, Cray steered supercomputing into the commercial data era. This paved the way for tackling analytics, simulations and AI – beyond just research computations.
The GPU Revolution and Path to Exascale (2000s – Present)
The 2000s saw exponential data growth across industries with software models also becoming more complex. As Moore‘s Law slowed, it sparked a pivot from a CPU-centric computing paradigm to more heterogeneous architectures melding:
- CPUs – Traditional sequential processing
- GPUs – Superior parallel processing
- Accelerators – Custom ASICs fine-tuned to workloads
- Interconnects – High bandwidth links between components
Keeping pace with these shifts, Cray debuted the Cray X1 in 2002 – an innovative vector processor/supercomputer featuring integrated CPUs, GPUs and high bandwidth point-to-point interconnects. By combining diverse processing elements it achieved high efficiency for large-scale simulations.
In the 2010s, Cray leaned further into leveraging GPU acceleration and new interconnect fabrics like its proprietary Aries. Flagship releases such as 2014‘s liquid-cooled Cray CS-Storm delivered 10x analytics performance gains via Tesla GPUs and 12-core Xeon CPUs tightly coupled by the Aries Dragonfly network.
This fused expertise across diverse processing architectures catalyzed Cray‘s push towards exascale computing – the next holy grail enabling over a quintillion calculations per second.
HPE Cray EX unveiled in 2018 is an exascale-class supercomputer platform.
In 2018, the Cray brand marked a new chapter by joining Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) while retaining its identity. Later that year, the first HPE Cray EX supercomputers were unveiled, leveraging foundational exascale Shasta architecture.
With groundbreaking speed and scale, these systems are already tackling highly complex datasets across scientific domains, national security and commercial verticals – cementing Cray‘s legacy of high performance computing innovation now for over 50 illustrious years and counting!
The Bigger Picture: Cray‘s Monumental Impact on Science and Research
While breathtaking hardware capabilities represent one facet of Cray‘s rich history, the other pivotal aspect is the massive scientific impact enabled by its supercomputing advances decade after decade.
Cray systems have powered Nobel prize-winning discoveries across physics, opened new frontiers in climate, bioscience, and industrial research while securing national security infrastructure. Commercial adoption has also catalyzed sectors from automotive to aerospace.
Here is just a snippet of history-defining achievements fueled by Cray supercomputers over 50+ years:
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Modeling Extreme Weather – Cray systems enabled the first realistic computer modeling of turbulent airflow. This allowed massive improvements in tornado prediction and tracking on Doppler weather radars.
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Simulating Supernovae – Detailed modeling of how dying starts collapse into supernovae on Cray supercomputers confirmed groundbreaking new physics theories about neutron stars.
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Designing Efficient Cars – Car manufacturers like GM first leveraged Cray systems in the 90s to simulate aerodynamic testing and cuts years off vehicle design timelines.
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Powering the Genome Revolution – Computational breakthroughs in biosciences were catalyzed by Cray hardware powering the Human Genome Project‘s monumental DNA sequencing efforts.
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Advancing Climate Science – Modern climate models providing critical global warming insights run on pre-exascale Cray supercomputers at research centers like the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.
And thousands more…across five decades!
The Road Ahead: Exascale Systems and Beyond!
Now under the HPE umbrella, Cray continues its relentless technology innovation as one the few companies with credible exascale computing roadmaps.
Its recent Shasta architecture incorporates breakthroughs like the Slingshot fabric that enables unprecedented scale-out capabilities for tackling exploding datasets across scientific and commercial domains.
As processing metrics make the mammoth leap from teraflops to petaflops and gigaflops, Cray sustains its legacy of powering the world‘s most advanced supercomputing platforms. With growing convergence across AI, IoT and cloud-native architectures, pioneering systems integrating these will open amazing new possibilities.
Who knows what the next 50 years hold? But one thing is certain – as the data and complexity deluge continues, companies, governments and researchers will keep turning to Cray for the gold standard in high performance computing. Just like they have for the past five decades where Seymour Cray‘s brilliant vision catalyzed an industry transforming how we solve our greatest challenges.
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