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Yet for all the miracles supercomputers have made possible, their users are still not satisfied. Computer Architect Neil Lincoln jokes that the real definition of a supercomputer is a machine that is just one generation behind the problems it is asked to solve. Norman Morse, head of computations at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has eleven supercomputers at his disposal but still cannot please his weapons designers and other scientists. Says he: "We already have jobs right now that require a machine 100 times as fast as anything we have."
The race to build those faster supercomputers is well under way. In dozens of laboratories in the U.S., Europe and Japan, millions of dollars are being spent to support the efforts of hundreds of engineers and scientists, all driven by the dream of building the world's most powerful computing machine. If any one team can be said to have the head start, it is the small, tightly knit group of technicians working in an industrial park in Chippewa Falls, Wis., where Cray Research has its most important laboratories.
Chippewa Falls (pop. 13,000) enjoys a local reputation for its Leinenkugel's beer and Chippewa Springs water. But it is known around the world as the home of one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in computer science: Seymour Cray. A shy, solitary engineer who rarely gives press interviews, Cray, 62, is to supercomputers what Edison was to light bulbs or Bell to the telephone. First as a co-founder of Control Data, then for his own firm, Cray has designed an extraordinary series of high-performance machines, including the CDC 1604 (1960), CDC 6600 (1964), CDC 7600 (1969), Cray-1 (1976) and Cray- 2 (1985), each of which could at the time lay claim to being the world's most powerful computer.
In 1981 Cray stepped down as chairman of the company and became a "consultant," but that only gave him more time to focus on computer design. He is now completing plans for his next machine, the Cray-3 (due to be released in 1989), and is soon expected to focus on its successor, the Cray-4, with a single-mindedness that is legendary. "Seymour has the ability to concentrate on his work to the wholesale exclusion of everything else," says James Thornton, a former engineering colleague at CDC. "He captures the universe of what he's going to design inside his head, and there he stays until he's through."
Technologically, Cray shows no signs of losing his innovative touch. The Cray-3 is expected to be the first commercial computer to use chips made of gallium arsenide as well as the usual silicon. Electrons travel up to ten times as fast through gallium arsenide, and although the material is more difficult and costly to work with, Cray has determined that the gain in speed will justify the added expense. Recognizing the growing importance of parallel processing, Cray is planning to give his most advanced model 64 processors, instead of the four in the Cray-2 and the 16 that will go into the Cray-3. Yet Cray is careful not to move too far, too fast. "The concept of stride is very important in developing computers," Cray told a group of customers last fall. "If you take a stride that is too large, you get bruised. If you take a step in one dimension, you better be careful about taking a step in another, or the step may get too long."