Seymour Cray - Control Data Corporation

Control Data Corporation

In 1951, Cray joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ERA had formed out of a former United States Navy laboratory that had built codebreaking machines, a tradition ERA carried on when such work was available. ERA was introduced to computer technology during one such effort, but in other times had worked on a wide variety of basic engineering as well.

Cray quickly came to be regarded as an expert on digital computer technology, especially following his design work on the ERA 1103, the first commercially successful scientific computer. He remained at ERA when it was bought by Remington Rand and then Sperry Corporation in the early 1950s. At the newly formed Sperry-Rand, ERA became the "scientific computing" arm of their UNIVAC division.

When the scientific computing division was phased out in 1957, a number of employees left to form Control Data Corporation (CDC). Cray wanted to follow immediately, but CDC's CEO, William Norris, refused, as Cray was in the midst of completing a project for the Navy, with whom Norris was interested in maintaining a good relationship. The project, the Naval Tactical Data System, was completed early the next year, whereupon Cray left for CDC as well.

By 1960 he had completed the design of the CDC 1604, an improved low-cost ERA 1103 that had impressive performance for its price range. Even as the CDC 1604 was starting to ship to customers in 1960, Cray had already moved on to designing its "replacement", the CDC 6600. Although in terms of hardware the 6600 was not on the leading edge, Cray invested considerable effort into the design of the machine in an attempt to enable it to run as fast as possible. Unlike most high-end projects, Cray realized that there was considerably more to performance than simple processor speed, that I/O bandwidth had to be maximized as well in order to avoid "starving" the processor of data to crunch. As he later noted, Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

The 6600 was the first commercial supercomputer, outperforming everything then available by a wide margin. While expensive, for those that needed the absolutely fastest computer available there was nothing else on the market that could compete. When other companies (namely IBM) attempted to create machines with similar performance, he increased the challenge by releasing the 5-fold faster CDC 7600.

In 1963, in a Business Week article announcing the CDC 6600, Seymour Cray clearly expressed an idea that is often misattributed to Herb Grosch as so-called Grosch's law:

Computers should obey a square law -- when the price doubles, you should get at least four times as much speed.