Project Overview
Seymour Cray is the undisputed father of Supercomputing, or high-performance
computing (HPC), as it now called. In 1975, Los
Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now LANL)
made a commitment to purchase and install Seymour Cray’s
first Cray-1A supercomputer; the 2005 sneak preview at SC'05 marked
the 30th anniversary of that event, which heralded the beginning of
the high-performance computing industry.
The historical and video record regarding Seymour Cray is sparse considering
his stature and achievements. Even among those who knew him, Seymour
was a very private man, highly-driven and keenly focused on a singular
desire to build the world’s fastest computers. Seymour’s
elegant computers and their direct descendents dominated the HPC industry
and the scientific and engineering marketplace for more than 40 years
until his untimely death in 1996 in an automobile accident.
Cray supercomputers epitomized technological supremacy, serving as tools
for technological advancement worldwide. For decades they revolutionized
national security, the fields of aerospace and automotive design, weather
prediction, and high-energy physics. More recently, supercomputers have
made significant contributions to the fields of genome research, drug
development, and pure physics.
The innovations that Seymour developed, including extremely dense packaging,
cooling technologies, multiple simultaneous instruction execution, large
common memories and vector processing, have all greatly influenced modern
CPU and IO processor design and laid the groundwork for the modern HPC
industry.
Approach
Of the Universe has
secured the rights to a number of rare Seymour Cray video recordings
of significant historical importance.
Included are personal interviews with Seymour Cray, recordings of his
rare public appearances, and interviews with Seymour’s contemporaries,
co-workers, customers and other supercomputing pioneers.
Archival footage has been digitally restored to the greatest extent
possible, and artistically integrated with other footage produced by
the principals. To expand this
body of work, we are capturing additional interviews with key co-workers,
customers and collaborators who worked closely with Seymour over the
years.
This
summer we interviewed Gary
Demos, developer of the Viper
FilmStream™ digital
camera, Gordon
E. Sawyer award, and four-time Academy Award winner
for technical achievement in the motion picture industry for the
production of photorealistic computer graphics in movies. Gary's
early use of supercomputers at Digital Productions, Inc. (DPI) with
his long-time technical collaborator, John C. Whitney, Jr., produced
some of the earliest photorealistic computer-generated imagery for
movies such as TRON, The
Last Starfighter, and Labyrinth.
Other
recent interviews include Horst
Simon, Bill Kramer, Buddy
Bland and Tom
Engel. Cooperation from the national laboratories
and contribution of materials from private parties and commercial
organizations has been nothing short of spectacular. All involved
understand the historical importance of bringing these restored images
together as a historical record of Seymour Cray’s life: the
man, his vision and his machines.
