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Some 150 supercomputers are in use around the world today; most of them were made in the U.S., and more than 100 of them were designed and built by Cray Research of Minneapolis. The new machine, like the Cray-1 before it, was the brainchild of the brilliant and reclusive Seymour Cray, 59, who founded the company in 1972. By densely packing 240,000 computer chips into a C-shaped cabinet 53 in. across and 45 in. high, Cray was able to minimize the crucial limiting factor in supercomputing: the time it takes electric currents to travel from one part of the machine to another.
But by squeezing the chips into a package the size of a hot tub, Cray created another problem. Unless it could be dissipated, the heat generated by electrons flowing through the tightly packed circuit boards would quickly melt the machine. Cray's answer: flooding the circuits with a continuous flow of Fluorinert, a liquid coolant that, incongruously, is also used as an artificial blood plasma. "It's a brilliantly innovative solution," says Astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of a new supercomputer center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's typical of Seymour's genius."
In the past few years, several Japanese firms have announced machines they claimed were faster than the U.S.'s most powerful supercomputers. But Cray Research, with two competing design teams, continues to hold the lead. Last month the company announced a new customer for its hot X-MP supercomputer line: Nissan Motors. Boasts Cray Chairman John Rollwagen: "We compete with the Japanese even on their home ground."
At Cray laboratories in Chippewa Falls, Wis., Designer Steve Chen is hard at work on the X-MP's successor, while Seymour Cray is devoting his time to the Cray-3. Due out in 1988, the Cray-3 will have an awesome 8 billion-byte memory. "As far back as I can remember, I was very proud to make factor-of- four improvements from one generation of machines to another," Cray said at a rare public appearance last month. "Instead, we're moving forward by factors of ten."
The next generation of supercomputers, by most accounts, will achieve its gains not by using faster processors but by using more of them. The Cray-1 had one main processor. The Cray-2 has four, and the Cray-3 may have as many as 16, all working in parallel. University researchers are now attempting to yoke dozens, even hundreds, of microprocessors together. "Multiprocessing is the biggest development in 40 years," says Illinois' Smarr. "We're entering what will be looked back on as the birth of new kinds of computers." One such machine under development at New York University has already been given a new name: the ultracomputer.