Fast and Smart

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Those comments were taken to be a pointed reference to the work of Steve Chen, 44, who left Cray Research abruptly when the company refused to go along with his plan to build an ambitious new machine. By the time he walked out the door, Chen was already a star in the supercomputer field. Born in China, he grew up in Taiwan, moved to the U.S., studied electrical engineering at Villanova and got his doctorate at the University of Illinois in Champaign/ Urbana. When he came to Cray Research in 1979, the company's officers thought they had found Cray's successor: someone as brilliant and dedicated as the master himself. Chen certainly aspired to be in the same class as Cray. Says he, with characteristic modesty: "There are only a few people crazy enough to do this all the time."

Chen quickly proved himself by reconfiguring the Cray-1 as a two-processor machine. The resulting computer, the Cray X-MP, became the best-selling supercomputer of all time, with more than 120 installed. Chen also designed the newly introduced Cray Y-MP, which the company hopes will match the commercial success of the X-MP. But Chen's drive to build ever more powerful computers brought him into conflict with Seymour Cray. The problem, according to Gary Smaby, a vice president at the Piper, Jaffray & Hopwood investment firm in Minneapolis, was not jealousy or a clash of personalities but contrasting technological styles. Cray's genius has been to get the most out of existing technology with a tight budget and skeleton staff. Chen took a "team approach," hiring a staff of 200 and encouraging them to push the state of the art wherever possible. In the eyes of management, Chen's proposed machine, the Cray MP, would have involved risk on five different technological fronts, including the limited use of fiber-optic cables to send some streams of data with beams of light rather than electrons. When projected costs hit $100 million, more than double the original budget, Cray Chairman John Rollwagen backed away and canceled the project outright, forcing Chen's resignation.

About 45 members of his research team at Cray defected along with Chen and set up shop twelve miles away in Eau Claire, Wis. Within three months Chen lined up the financial commitment from IBM, estimated at $10 million to $45 million. "We know what it takes to nurture visionaries," says IBM's Wladawsky-Berger. "We want Chen to swing for the fences." And that is what he intends to do. Says Chen: "Five years from now we should be at 100 billion gigaFLOPS. A problem that takes three months to do now, we want to do in a day."