By: Boelie Elzen and Donald MacKenzie
ISBN: 979-8-4007-1369-9 DOI: 10.1145/3705551. eBook: $36.00 | Paperback: $45.00 | Hardcover: $65.00
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Notes
Available on Amazon or direct from the ACM ( members get a discount )
Clive was generously credited with research assistance for some of the pictures in this book and there are bibliography reference to the Cray-History.net site. This is great as it proves someone is reading the site 🙂 Anyway I got my hands on this one recently and really enjoyed reading it. The book covers supercomputers of the Seymour Cray era including those from CDC, ERA, IBM and Cray Research. A great exploration of where some of the basic ideas came from along with descriptions of why some were commercially successful and others not so much. This is the book I would have liked to write.
Publisher Words
This book describes the development and use of supercomputers in the period 1960-1996, a time known as the Seymour Cray Era. For more than three decades, Cray’s computer designs were seen as the yardstick against which all other efforts were measured. Initially, this yardstick was sheer computing speed. However, the supercomputer world gradually became more complex and other factors became equally important.
The initial development of supercomputers was commissioned and financed by the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which had huge computational needs in connection with nuclear weapons development. The computers designed by Cray satisfied those needs, and these computers were also sold to a few dozen other big research organizations and weather agencies. In the 1970s and 1980s, a variety of companies started to compete with the Cray designs by offering supercomputers that used a new architectural approach, MPP: massively parallel processing. This new architecture based on using tens of thousands of simple microprocessors subsequently began to dominate high-performance computing and marked the end of the Seymour Cray Era.
This book is important reading for anyone working in the area of high-performance computing, providing essential historical context for the work of a legendary pioneer and the computers he became famous for designing. It will also be valuable to students of computing history and, more generally, to readers interested in the history of science and technology. For advanced students, the book illustrates how innovation in its very essence is a socio-technical process: not just a matter of developing the “best technology,” but also of making appropriate choices concerning the interaction of human and technical factors in product design.
ACM Description of book. https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3705551
