The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer

by Charles J. Murray

The SUPERMEN

"After a rare speech at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1976, programmers in the audience had suddenly fallen silent when Cray offered to answer questions. He stood there for several minutes, waiting for their queries, but none came. When he left, the head of NCAR's computing division chided the programmers. 'Why didn't someone raise a hand?' After a tense moment, one programmer replied, 'How do you talk to God?'" -from The SUPERMEN The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer

"They were building revolutionary, not evolutionary, machines. . . . They were blazing a trail-molding science into a product. . . . The freedom to create was extraordinary." -from The Supermen

In 1951, a soft-spoken, skinny young man fresh from the University of Minnesota took a job in an old glider factory in St. Paul. Computer technology would never be the same, for the glider factory was the home of Engineering Research Associates and the recent college grad was Seymour R. Cray. During his extraordinary career, Cray would be alternately hailed as "the Albert Einstein," "the Thomas Edison," and "the Evel Knievel" of supercomputing. At various times, he was all three-a master craftsman, inventor, and visionary whose disdain for the rigors of corporate life became legendary, and whose achievements remain unsurpassed.

The Supermen is award-winning writer Charles J. Murray's exhilarating account of how the brilliant-some would say eccentric-Cray and his gifted colleagues blazed the trail that led to the Information Age. This is a thrilling, real-life scientific adventure, deftly capturing the daring, seat-of-the-pants spirit of the early days of computer development, as well as an audacious, modern-day David and Goliath battle, in which a group of maverick engineers beat out IBM to become the runaway industry leaders.

Murray's briskly paced narrative begins during the final months of the Second World War, when men such as William Norris and Howard Engstrom began researching commercial applications for the code-breaking machines of wartime, and charts the rise of technological research in response to the Cold War. In those days computers were huge, cumbersome machines with names like Demon and Atlas. When Cray came on board, things quickly changed.

Drawing on in-depth interviews-including the last interview Cray completed before his untimely and tragic death-Murray provides rare insight into Cray's often controversial approach to his work. Cray could spend exhausting hours in single-minded pursuit of a particular goal, and Murray takes us behind the scenes to witness late-night brainstorming sessions and miraculous eleventh-hour fixes. Cray's casual, often hostile attitude toward management, although alienating to some, was more than a passionate need for independence; he simply thought differently than others. Seymour Cray saw farther and faster, and trusted his vision with an unassailable confidence. Yet he inspired great loyalty as well, making it possible for his own start-up company, Cray Research, to bring the 54,000-employee conglomerate of Control Data to its knees.

Ultimately, The Supermen is a story of genius, and how a unique set of circumstances-a small-team approach, corporate detachment, and a government-backed marketplace-enabled that genius to flourish. In an atmosphere of unparalleled freedom and creativity, Seymour Cray's vision and drive fueled a technological revolution from which America would emerge as the world's leader in supercomputing.

Genres: History, Biography, Technology, Computers, Nonfiction, Computer Science, Science

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Simon Arneberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Simon - I thought you might find it interesting to read a bit of history about the giants whose shoulders you stand on, even if only for a few short years. Enjoy! - Dad (Tom Arneberg)" (2/5/2025).

It was an interesting experience to read this book during my lunch breaks at work, in the building that is still consistently producing the fastest supercomputers in the world -- descendants of Seymour Cray's initial designs. While I'm not involved in the physical design process, I did enjoy learning the history of computing, along with some local Chippewa Falls history.

The main theme of this book seemed to be innovation vs inevitable bureaucracy, and the pursuit of the ever-elusive "engineer's paradise". Seymour Cray's intense devotion to his creative process makes me feel inspired to work more deeply in all areas of life. Also I think it would be cool to manually dig a tunnel network beneath my house someday...

[Dillon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish it had more technical detail

[Kursad Albayraktaroglu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and informative read on Seymour Cray and the various companies he was involved in. There is not much technical material on the features or the architecture of the Cray machines here ; which is fair in a book intended for the general audience. However, the human stories behind these marvelous machines and details of Cray’s eccentric life make it a fascinating book.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seymour Cray is one of the greatest virtuoso engineers of all time.

I'd read about him in various other books. He was noted for his eccentricities. Instead of working in some lab in a major city, he worked in a cottage overlooking a lake in Wisconsin (Lake Wissota, Chippewa Falls, northeast of Eau Claire, roughly 90 miles east of Minneapolis). He'd build a sailboat, sail it on the lake and, next spring, burn that one and start building another. Each one better than the last.

The "larger" story is a bit more complex than that. And this book is largely about him. Sure, it begins with other people, working for the Navy during WW II. But he becomes an important figure pretty quickly and the book ends with his passing in 1996.

I never met him but I was aware of him. I was a "computer geek" in high school and, among computer geeks, the name "Cray" was spoken with reverence. He made the fastest computers in the world. That's not an exaggeration.

This story isn't so much about the computers. Some technical specs are given, but not that much. I was a little disappointed in that regard; 4 stars instead of 5 'cuz I would've loved to "geek out" over more of the details. But his biggest struggles in life sound oddly familiar in my own life.

I'm a programmer or, in more modern parlance, a "software engineer." An engineer takes known principles of science and applies them to create products. Engineers may get involved in research, but that's usually a means to an end; we need to create this product, and some of the details aren't fully understood, so we'll do some research to finish fleshing it out. Scientists focus on research, engineers on the application of what they discover. This is true for electrical / hardware / computer engineers, like Cray, and for software engineers like yours truly.

The problem for people like me is that, beyond a certain point, companies don't seem to have much use for us. We progress to a certain level and ... if you want to make more money, you have to go into management. The management skillset is very different from the engineering skillset. Insomuch as I've dedicated multiple years to getting a degree and decades gaining experience at what I do, why would I want to set aside all that training and experience and start, from scratch, on a new skillset?

Theoretically, a knowledgeable engineer knows better than anyone how to manage other engineers. But theory and practice ... not the same thing. The Peter Principle states that everyone rises to the level of their incompetence. If you're good at what you do, you move up. When you're no longer good at what you do, that's where you stop. Why would any, intelligently-run organization want to take people who are very competent at one job and move them up until they hit a level they're not good at? And yet, that's how it works.

Then, as now, companies really don't know what to do with experienced engineers who just want to be engineers. Some of them genuinely try to create a career path where people with significant technical skills and experience get to use it, designing stuff for others to build and mentoring the less-experienced. But for all to many ... the only way up is through management. Which engineers frequently see as "crossing to the Dark Side."

A common refrain in this book is that, when things got too "corporatized," the engineers left and started a new company. One where they were needed as engineers. One where it was clearly understood that the company lived / died based on just how good they were, just how hard they worked, as engineers. Management was kept to a minimum.

It starts with Engineering Research Associates (ERA). They got bought and the engineers chafed at the management of their parent company. So they left and founded Control Data Corporation (CDC). When Cray found himself spending more time shaking hands and reporting to management, he became what is more commonly known (today) as an "intrapreneur." Without spinning off a separate company (that would be an "entrepreneur"), he took his engineering team, moved them away from the all the corporate distractions (hello, Chippewa Falls) and then turned around and delivered. They were getting nowhere in the old environment; in the new environment, engineers were free to be engineers and the management was far away. So they succeeded.

Not "and they succeeded." "So they succeeded." There is implied causation between separation and success. And any engineer quickly discovers that there is a definite causative relationship between micromanagement and failure.

When CDC's management became too much, Cray became a contractor. Again, things got too "corporatized" and he left, forming Cray Research and introducing the Cray 1. The CDC machines are little before my time but the Cray 1 ... ooh yeah, I remember those. I have pictures of me posing with one at the Computer History Museum. For me, actually getting to touch a Cray 1 was a Bucket List item.

The follow-up, the Cray 2? Oh yeah, I remember that one too. There's never been another computer like it, before or since, that I'm aware. I mean, c'mon: that thing immerses the electronics in liquid (?!) and uses a FOUNTAIN (!!) to cool the liquid. No, I'm not joking. There were practical reasons for that design.

No one designed machines like Seymour Cray. No. One.

When Cray Research became too "corporatized," he left. Again. Unfortunately, the next venture was not successful.

As with so many small tech companies, there's frequently a race: can we finish a successful product before we run out of money? With CDC and Cray Research, success arrived first. For Steve Chen's Supercomputer Systems Incorporated (SSI; Steve Chen is sometimes regarded as the designer of two Cray systems, the X-MP and Y-MP) and for Cray Computer Company (CCC; Seymour's next act after Cray Research) ... the money ran out first. For each of those companies, there were some very interesting technologies being developed.

SSI was developing a system to cool the chips which involved spraying coolant on them; the coolant had a low boiling point and flashed to "steam" on contact, carrying away the heat (phase-change cooling is EXTREMELY effective). They were working on multi-chip carriers, meaning one ceramic casing had not one but multiple chips inside; by cramming the individual chips closer together than the single-chip packaging (still common, today) allowed, they could push speeds even higher. They were also working on multi-ported RAM (not just dual-ported, as found in many video cards; and this was LONG before video cards existed) and light-based timing, instead of electrical (the norm, still today).

For CCC, Cray had decided that he'd ridden silicon as far as it could go and was manufacturing chips based on gallium arsenide, which was 6x as fast as comparable silicon chips. He was also tightly stacking the component boards onto solid blocks, with circuit pathways going in all 3 dimensions.

Neither of those companies survived and, so far as I'm aware, neither of those technologies did, either. I can only imagine how fast PCs and tablets would be, today, if they were using gallium arsenide instead of silicon. As for multi-chip carriers, modern smartphone CPUs are actually microcontrollers, integrating multiple functions into a single chip. Instead of cramming multiple chips into one package, we've crammed the equivalent of several chips into a single chip and stuffed THAT into one package.

In both cases (SSI and CCC), the founders were trying to create ideal environments for engineers to be engineers, with a minimum of "corporatization." Sure, this engineer is more of a leader / mentor to other, junior engineers. But few, if any, are purely "management;" almost everyone "works for a living." Unfortunately, success (especially if you go public) means you will need some dedicated management; no one seems to have found a way to automate away all the management (a very worthwhile goal, IMHO). Once you get too many management and ancillary positions, it's only a matter of time before people forget who is creating the products that create the wealth. And when those people are unappreciated ... they leave. After which it's only a matter of time before the wealth is no longer created and it all goes downhill (see CDC and Cray Research). The only alternative, from management's point of view, is to view the engineers as disposable / replaceable. When Seymour Cray left Cray Research, they had to have a new "genius" designer; when Seymour left, investors left. Hence Steve Chen being promoted as the "creator" of the X-MP and Y-MP (yes, he contributed, but both were variations on the Cray 1 and largely orchestrated by another engineer who didn't want the limelight). After a well-run publicity campaign, the investors calmed down because, although Seymour was gone, there was a new "genius" at the helm.

Doesn't that sound all too familiar?

I got really tired of all the corporate mess, myself. I'm kinda like Seymour Cray in his Chippewa Falls facility. I go to the office very few days. I'm in contact with those who care, and I can communicate effectively without needing to be there, physically (99+% of the time, anyway). Reporters noted that the Chippewa Falls lab had plenty of windows, set next to a forested area. There was a salt lick just outside the front door, so deer would frequent the area. I have a nice, wide window looking out over grass and a forested area. Both of these are examples of Christopher Alexander's "Windows Overlooking Life" pattern, noted for helping to spur creativity. Seymour's "commute" was a couple hundred yards, on a path through the woods from his house to his lab. Mine is within my house.

I totally empathize with what he was trying to accomplish. I'm nowhere near his level of virtuosity in my craft but ... I can understand. He just wanted to be the best engineer he could be.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been languishing on my Amazon wish list for some years, and someone finally snagged it for me (couldn't find it in local libraries, couldn't find it used) . . . The book is pretty slight. One thing I remember vividly from a visit to the Computer Museum in Boston (closed now) was a display a book with the instruction set for one of Cray's machines: It was hand-written in ink. Apparently that was Cray's style. This omission leads me to believe that there might be other gaps in the book - it also writes, for instance, "mother board" for motherboard and "back plane" for backplane: A bit odd for a book with a fair amount of technical detail. Still, on to the story:

This is as much a book about upper midwest computing as it is about Seymour Cray. Through a sort of post-WW2 fluke, a St. Paul-based military glider manufacturer (!) wanted to find a new product line because it seemed obvious that the military was no longer going to need gliders. The head of the business discovered an opening in devices for numerical computation, and founded a company that had some small successes. But then they hired Seymour Cray. After a few months, Cray became the chief designer, and built a very fast computer. Then after some more time, he and a group of key engineers left and founded Control Data Corporation (CDC). Soon they were building the fastest computers in the world. When the CDC 6600 was introduced and immediately recognized as the fastest computer in the world, the CEO of IBM (Thomas Watson) was incensed, and wrote a scathing memo asking why CDC trumped them with only 34 people ("including the janitor") (p. 93). The answer was Cray.

The heyday of this work was happening around the Twin Cities in the 1950s-1980s: Back this, MSP was a genuinely technical rival to other areas of the company, and the epicenter was CDC.

Cray did a number of things that were quite unusual in his day:

* He built his computers with much smaller instruction sets than the competition (say, 65 instruction types rather than hundreds). His customers found this very elegant, with a quick learning curve.
* He was a "fast follower," and would wait for others to learn how to use core technologies such as transistors and integrated circuits. Even without these new technologies, his computers were always the fastest owing to his ability to squeeze circuits tighter and tighter.
* He only did green field design, and his computers were never backwards compatible. He called this "burning the boats" and would not add superfluous design elements that would keep his machines from being the fastest.
* He was at his best with small teams, working in isolation. Most of the work of CDC and later Cray was done in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, far enough away from corporate headquarters in the Twin Cities that he would rarely be bothered by management.

I suppose the rest of this review would be a spoiler . . .


But in the end, all of his companies died the death of bureaucracy. Typically Cray would leave the company (e.g., CDC) to found a new one (Cray). He did this several times with increasingly arcane business techniques to get the money together to build a new computer. Towards the end, according to this book, even Cray was blocked by "yes" men in his organization who wouldn't tell him the truth about technical progress which had to delegate to younger engineers, owing to increases in complexity and specialization in hardware engineering.

[Jake Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read that illustrates a fascinating connection between the Twin Cities/Minnesota, Control Data, and the development of modern computing systems. Cray was certainly an exceptional man who contributed much to the industry and our world while remaining relatively unknown to the general public.

It’s hard to credit everyone when you have a towering figure like Seymour Cray leading the charge in the development of these machines, and it’s always important to remember the teams that contributed as well.

[Andrew O'reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome history of the early supercomputer era written by somebody who clearly understands how the human side of engineering actually works as well as computer technology. The industry needs more history books like this (I can only imagine how much better Steve Jobs biography would have been if Charles Murray had written it instead of Isaacson).

[Tom Heller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ended somewhat abruptly. The opening “in media res” chapter was pointless. Text focused far more on the Cray company than on Seymour Cray himself. I personally would have enjoyed more technical details about the supercomputer system architectures and software.

[Joshua Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incisive history of the supercomputer up to SS-1, Seymour Cray's accident, and the aborted Cray 3.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Follows Seymore Cray & his career. Felt like a 100 page book stretched into 250 pages.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the 60s to the 80s, the story of Supercomputers in one man. It was great history to relive. Light on the technology but long on events and people, I enjoyed the read.

[Nick Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Parity is for dirt farmers." - Seymour Cray

Amazon 2008-10-13. Seymour Cray is my god and pwns you. From the Seymour Cray documentary project:

Seymour Cray is the undisputed father of Supercomputing, or high-performance computing (HPC) as it now called. In 1975, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now LANL) made a commitment to purchase and install Seymour Cray’s first Cray-1A supercomputer; the 2005 sneak preview at SC'05 marked the 30th anniversary of that event, which heralded the beginning of the high-performance computing industry.

The historical and video record regarding Seymour Cray is sparse considering his stature and achievements. Even among those who knew him, Seymour was a very private man, highly driven and keenly focused on a singular desire: to build the world’s fastest computers. Seymour’s elegant computers and their direct descendents dominated the HPC industry and the scientific and engineering marketplace for more than 40 years until his untimely death in 1996 in an automobile accident.

Cray supercomputers epitomized technological supremacy, serving as tools for technological advancement worldwide. For decades they revolutionized national security, the fields of aerospace and automotive design, weather prediction, and high-energy physics. More recently, supercomputers have made significant contributions to the fields of genome research, drug development, and pure physics.

The innovations that Seymour developed, including extremely dense packaging, cooling technologies, multiple simultaneous instruction execution, large common memories and vector processing, have all greatly influenced modern CPU and IO processor design and laid the groundwork for the modern HPC industry.

Along with von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Knuth and Fermi, Cray is one of my very greatest heroes and inspirations. Huzzah!

So, I read this tonight procrastinating away a project. It was the worst-written book I've come across since...LaHaye & Jenkins, I think. Sad, sad, sad. =/

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA has an exhibition about supercomputers: a CDC 6600, a Cray-1, a piece of the CPU of another Cray-1, a Cray-2, a processor board of a Cray-3. All these were the fastest computers in the world at the time of their introduction (the Cray-3 would have been if it had succeeded), and they were all designed by a computer engineer called Seymour Cray. This book tells about the man's life and times; his successes (CDC 6600, Cray-1) and failures (CDC 8600, Cray-3, Cray-4), his conflicts with management and founding of new startups. It also tells about a rival computer engineer Steve Chen, who designed the Cray X-MP and Y-MP computers, which saved the company from bankruptcy, and founded his own supercomputer startup, which failed. There are a few small mistakes: at one point the book talks about replacing electromechanical relays with digital circuitry; relays are already digital circuitry.

[Eric Philipp · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a computer nerd this is a must read, the very beginnings of the supercomputer and supercomputing in general. As a native of the Twin Cities area of Minnesota I remembered some of these news worthy events. Control Data's rise and fall, and when Cray Research came to be in Mendota Heights. This was a wonderful book from all angles. Well written, well researched and just the right amount of tech. While this book is now somewhat hard to find it is worth your time to seek out I enjoyed every page and I have loaned my copy to a few IT friends of mine that also enjoyed it thoroughly.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a quick interesting read about the supercomputing industry focusing primarily on Seymour Cray. Unfortunately, it is rather disorganized and provides little insight into Cray's personal life and upbringing. For example, his divorce is mentioned in only one sentence in passing and his upbringing in only a few pages. The book ends basically saying the Cray way is outdated so I'm not sure what to take from the narrative. The question of what produces such a man is left unanswered.

[Isaac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to the incredible mind of Seymour Cray. The book got a little repetitive at times, but then again, Cray was repetitive: he kept succeeding in upending the supercomputer industry, again and again.

[Shy Writer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always knew about Seymour Cray and the CRAY supercomputer.. I now learned what came after the CRAY-1 ~ The failures of the companies and CRAYs that never were that followed and his tragic death by car accident. The man was a true 100% genius...

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're involved in HPC, or, if you attend classes in the U of M's IT, this is fun background knowledge to have.

[Christopher Swenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very personal, sad tale of Cray's journey through the supercomputing world.

[Alain van Hoof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read about Cray, the companies he worked for or created and the way he looked at innovation

[Antimidas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history of Seymour Cray and the history of supercomputers. I have read it once. Lost my original copy. Just purchased again through Amazon so I can read it again.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like Soul Of A New Machine from 30,000 feet. Readable but everything was very one-dimensional. Hoped for more insight about Cray himself but didn't really get much of that