* Posts by Retired old bloke

1 publicly visible post • joined 2 Oct 2015

The Steve Jobs of supercomputers: We remember Seymour Cray

Retired old bloke

Great hardware, but ...

The first three Cray 1s were the _very_ fastest - at the time: they didn't use ECC like the later ones. The Los Alamos machine was shipped elsewhere (Livermore?), then to Daresbury labs (UK) then to the University of London Computing Centre. I worked with it at those two sites. The application software they shipped with it was pretty crap - the CFD code we were running ran faster on a CDC 7600 than on the Cray, initially. We (at QMC, London, & a colleague at Harwell) took the Cray's FFT software to pieces & totally reworked it so that it ran OK on the Cray We then offered the FFTs back into the community under the old pals act. Some six months later Cray were shipping the improved code in their application packages. Some months after that, at QMC, that we received a letter at from the US State Department stating that we were running un-approved (for export) software, and would we desist. Prof Leslie, our head of department got in touch with Harwell and worked out how much time we had all spent getting the FFTs to run OK and sent a letter back to the State Dept along the lines of

"Thank you for drawing this to my attention with respect to the software we developed. My staff and colleagues spent so-and-so much time on this software and I enclose an invoice for £XXXX. I await your payment." The letter was longer than that of course & I can't remember what the £XXXX sum was - something in the region of £16K or so. In any event, we never heard another peep from any US Govt. department.