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The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
(Review) The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes is a technical and business history of the roughly three-decades when Seymour Cray dominated the development of a class of computer called the “supercomputer”. The book covers the development of the major supercomputer models, the technical decisions and trade-offs involved, and changes to the market.
Scientific computing heavily used floating point, dealt with complex numerical data such as matrices and chains of differential equations, often CPU bound, and featured a very small base of highly technical users with specialized and often unique problems (e.g. national laboratories). The book covers the development of the CRAY-1 and the other major models that came out of Cray’s companies, as well as CDC, IBM, Texas Instruments, and Fujitsu efforts to compete in the area. The latter half of the book includes discussion of operating system development, evolution of compilers (mostly Fortran) and their interplay with instruction sets, and specialized tools for specific industries (e.g. computational fluid dynamics).
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