Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers

MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com> schrieb:

Did the book relate the story of why CRAY-1 presented a DC-load to
the power supply:: that is, the ECL gates were all of the form where
they would switch 20 ma into either the true or the complement out-
put and thus have no AC energy at the power supply level ??

That they didn't mention.  They stressed his decision to build
a machine which had good all-round performance, unlike the
predecessors like the STAR or the Texas Instruments ASC (which I
had never heard or read of).

There was one part on the Cray-I design that I found weird.  After
writing that individual transistors would have been faster than
integrated circuits, but were chosen for density and manufacture,
they wrote

"Concerning memory, as in the case of the CPU, Cray did not
choose the fastest individual components, which would have
been magnetic cores" due to their limitations in size.

What they also describe well is the tradeoff between different
vector lengths.  Also very interesting is the mechanisms of getting
the machines adopted by different industries.