IP: A MUST READ --Seymour Cray == an "appreciation," aimed

[Dave Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

7 October 1996
The Washington Post, Style section


APPRECIATION


Cray Saw Beauty in Computers


By Elizabeth Corcoran
Washington Post Staff Writer


According to the old saying, if a man made a better mousetrap, the world 
would beat a path to his door. Even if he lived in the woods.
    For decades, Seymour Cray lived up to that adage. From a lab in rural 
Chippewa Falls, Wis., he designed the Lamborghinis of the computer world
and gave them his  surname. Building computers was his livelihoodbut it was
also his passion. Cray designed the  machines to suit his whimsy, each time
challenging his imagination to do something that  hadn't been done
before--to build the fastest machine in the world.
    Throughout the years, he designed with the joyfulness of a young man in 
love a blaze with new ideas, unencumbered by earlier mistakes. For that,
many in the engineering  and scientific worlds thought of him as a hero.
     He once said he was surprised that anyone else was willing to buy his 
creations.
     But they were. Like a Stradivarius violin, a Cray supercomputer became 
a mark of excellence, of prowess. It also became a symbol of the
sophistication of American  engineering at a time when its primacy was
gravely challenged.
      Cray, an intensely private man who often said he didn't deal well with 
people, died Saturday in Colorado Springs of head and neck injuries he
received in an auto  accident last month. He was 71 years old.
     For millions of people, Cray was a name best known from spy novels. In 
such tales, the hero would wangle a few precious computation minutes on a
prized Cray  supercomputer, jealously guarded behind windowless walls in
the heart of the CIA or the National  Security Agency. The Cray invariably
offered up an intriguing insight into the mystery at hand.
     But Crays were more than hulking computer muscle. Much as Frank Lloyd 
Wright became known for the simple grace of his wood and stone buildings,
Seymour Cray was revered  for the elegant, clean designs of his machines,
both inside and out.
      "I've always been interested in aesthetics," Cray told Smithsonian 
historian David Allison, who interviewed the engineer last year for an
oral history of computing.  "So many computer products are rectangular
boxes and don't seem to  have any aesthetic  appeal." When Cray debuted the
Cray-1 in 1976, it was cylindrical and featured  a cozy, warm  seat. It
was, after all, located right above a power converter.
      For a technologist, Cray had a rare genius for design. He invented 
tricks that made others
gasp with admiration. At the heart of the early blueprints, for instance, 
was the idea that every command the machine carried out must travel through
the central  processorlike cars filing one by one through a tunnel. Cray
invented graceful ways to speed up  the traffic by transforming those cars
into double-decker buses and magically creating  additional routes.
      One early machine, the Model 6600, put existing electronic leviathans 
to shame. When it debuted, then-IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr. issued a
biting memo to his  staff, demanding to know how Cray's team of "34
people--including the janitor" had bested the  industry's mightiest
corporation.
      If Cray had invented only clever new computer designs, he would have 
been admired and called a genius. But it was not just what he did, but how
he did it.
       Engineering is a conscientious discipline of compromise. Among the 
most difficult are those that balance past and future technologies. The
design of a computer or piece  of software includes genes that must be
passed down to the next generation for the  system to be compatible--
for this year's model  to work with last year's.
       But compatibility has its costs. As engineers work on their designs, 
they better understand the flaws in their earlier work. To make up for
those problems, they must  turn to ever more elaborate tricks and
sophisticated puzzle piecesall of which makes the final  thing more
ponderous and complex. That burden becomes like the emotional scars of a 
world-weary lover, each new relationship shaped by earlier ones. Not Cray.
He started every  design afresh, literally on a blank sheet of paper. "The
blank sheet of paper is not a  blank mind," he said.
"I wanted to take advantage of all the things that I remembered and all the 
inputs I had gotten from people, ... By the blank piece of paper, I mean
that I liked to  start over with the technical details, review all the
things that the world offers at this  point in time,
rather than to reuse things that were just used."
    Every design was a fresh romance, cut loose from the flaws of the past. 
Every design was risky. There was little artifice to Cray's approach. He
would tell people  that he wasn't sure if the ideas would work this time.
    But it was exhilarating--like falling in love for the first time, again 
and again. Others watched with admiration. And because Cray did no boastful
preening, because  he was just the guy in the lab doing what he had always
wanted to do, his peers' delight was  not traced with
bitterness or envy. Cray wasn't trying to best them--he was trying to out-do 
himself.
     As time went on, it became harder for Cray to build his new machines. 
By the early 1990s, an idea that Cray had helped pioneer parallelism, or
carrying out multiple   operations simultaneouslyhad been exploited by
others. While Cray's designs continued  to use a relatively small number of
enormously powerful microprocessors, massively  parallel computers,
which harnessed hundreds of punier processors, became the vogue.
    Cray's last major project, the Cray-4, was designed to use exotic 
materials that no one else in the computer industry had dared to touch. It
almost defeated him. After  lengthy delays, his team finished one working
machine and closed its books last year.
    But Cray was undaunted. He was enthusiastically plunging ahead, looking 
to the human brainfor inspiration. Sighed Gordon Bell, a pioneering
computer designer at Digital Equipment Corp.: "I was counting on him to
make another breakthrough."