Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the NCR Corporation (NCR), General Electric, and Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC. For most of the 1960s, the strength of CDC was the work of the electrical engineer Seymour Cray who developed a series of fast computers, then considered the fastest computing machines in the world; in the 1970s, Cray left the Control Data Corporation and founded Cray Research (CRI) to design and make supercomputers. In 1988, after much financial loss, the Control Data Corporation began withdrawing from making computers and sold the affiliated companies of CDC; in 1992, Cray established Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining affiliate companies of CDC currently do business as the software company Dayforce.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."
The BUNCH was the nickname for the group of mainframe computer competitors of IBM in the 1970s. The name is derived from the names of the five companies: Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation (CDC), and Honeywell. These companies were grouped together because the market share of IBM was much higher than all of its competitors put together.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a series of supercomputers from IBM. SP systems were part of the IBM RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) family, and were also called the RS/6000 SP. The first model, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, and new models were introduced throughout the 1990s until the RS/6000 was succeeded by eServer pSeries in October 2000. The SP is a distributed memory system, consisting of multiple RS/6000-based nodes interconnected by an IBM-proprietary switch called the High Performance Switch (HPS). The nodes are clustered using software called PSSP, which is mainly written in Perl.
David Blair Kirk is a computer scientist and former chief scientist and vice president of architecture at NVIDIA. As of 2019, he is an independent consultant and advisor.
The Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizes contributions to digital systems and computer architecture. It is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. First awarded in 1979, it was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who between 1943 and 1946 collaborated on the design and construction of the first large scale electronic computing machine, known as ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. A certificate and $5,000 are awarded jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding contributions to the field of computer and digital systems architecture.
Steven "Steve" J. Wallach is an engineer, consultant and technology manager. He is a Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award recipient.
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator. He is the chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia and was previously a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and MIT. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Burton J. Smith was an American computer architect. He was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft.
Marc Snir is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He holds a Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He was the principal investigator (PI) for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC).
The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier. The recognition is engraved on a silver medal specially struck for the Society.
Mateo Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect. His research encompasses different concepts within the field of computer architecture, a discipline in which he has published more than 700 papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. Valero has received numerous awards, including the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2007, for "extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism." He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which hosts the MareNostrum supercomputer.
The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of high-performance computing. The award honors scientists who exhibit the creativity demonstrated by Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Research, Inc., and an early pioneer of supercomputing. Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. He played a key role in the invention and design of the UNIVAC 1103, a landmark high-speed computer and the first computer available for commercial use.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
Steve Scott is a computer architect who currently serves as Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. Scott was previously a Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Cray Inc., Principal Engineer at Google and the chief technology officer for Nvidia's Tesla business unit. Scott was employed by Cray Research, Inc., Silicon Graphics, Inc., and Cray, Inc. from 1992 to 2011.
Claud M. Davis was an American engineer, inventor, and employee of the IBM Corporation at Poughkeepsie, New York. He was known for his contributions to the development of the IBM System/360 and the development of air traffic control systems.
