First Commercially Successful Supercomputer, Cray-1, Featured On New US Dollar Coin

The first commercially successful supercomputer, the Cray-1, stars as the featured subject on a new one-dollar coin released by the United State Mint earlier today.

While many of today’s younger technology workers might not be familiar with the Cray-1, the Cray-1’s release 50 years ago marked a watershed moment in establishing the United States as a leader in the realm of high-performance computing. At the time of its release, the Cray-1 was 10 times faster than competing machines, a difference so significant that the Cray-1 dominated as the world’s fastest computer for over half a decade.

Designed for rapidly performing heavy-duty calculations, the Cray-1 was shaped like a circular “C” (with a human-usable bench around it) – a signature look that reduced internal latency by allowing the use of shorter wire lengths than would otherwise be necessary. The Cray-1 was also the first commercially-successful computer to offer vector processing – that is, the ability to simultaneously run operations on multiple data points; the Cray-1’s success in this regard helped bring about the era of parallel processing from which we all benefit today.

The Cray-1 was not cheap – in today’s dollars it cost somewhere around $50 million to purchase, and it used about $200,000 worth of electricity per month. But, for entities like Los Alamos National Laboratory, which utilized the first Cray-1 ever produced in order to run simulations of complex nuclear reactions (and, as a result, was able to perform various measurements without having to produce actual nuclear detonations that would otherwise have been required in order to yield the same scientific knowledge) the Cray-1 supercomputer was invaluable.

Of course, a half century of rapid technological innovation might make the Cray-1’s specifications seem weak – especially to those unfamiliar with earlier eras of computing. The Z Fold 7 smartphone released by Samsung last year, for example, sports a processor than can perform some calculations at a rate of more than 20,000 times as fast as the Cray-1’s 160 MFLOPS (Million Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS). That said, in its time, the Cray-1’s performance seemed to many people to almost be the stuff of science fiction.

The US Mint honors the Cray-1 as part of its American Innovation Dollar Series, on the coin minted to honor achievements made in Wisconsin, where the Cray-1’s primary inventor, the late Seymour Cray, lived and built his research and development company.

The coin can be obtained from the US Mint website.

Joseph Steinberg( Cybersecurity Expert Witness and Board Member )

Joseph Steinberg is a cybersecurity expert witness and advisor, and a Lecturer on Cybersecurity at Columbia University in NYC. He has led businesses in the information-security industry for over two decades, and has written books ranging from the best-selling Cybersecurity for Dummies to the official study guide for a CISO certification exam. He is one of only a few dozen people worldwide to hold the suite of advanced information security certifications, CISSP, ISSAP, ISSMP, and CSSLP, indicating that he possesses a rare, robust knowledge of information security that is both broad and deep; his information-security-related inventions are cited in well over 500 US patent filings.

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