Email the Author

About the Book

Cray Research supported the National Security Agency's philosophy of NOBUS (Nobody But Us) by building the world's fastest supercomputers. Charles Murray tells that story in The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer (John Wiley, 1997). The first Cray Research supercomputer was bare metal. We supplied no software whatsoever! The second supercomputer (CRAY-1 serial number 2) never existed--until the NSA declassified its delivery decades later. Serial number 3 included operating system and Fortran compiler. That's how our Cray Research Software Division was born.

What was it like, walking the hallways of "Nobody But Us"? We created "The Cray Style", a description of our environment, expectations, mutual respect. Within Cray Research I developed an intuition, a deep understanding of how computers work, that has served throughout my career. I'll be walking you through these experiences. I find that the fun is in the challenges. Thus, I assure you, we'll have fun along the way! I'll even show you how we programmed "Big Iron" (the large mainframes of the era) as "Bare Metal" (straight-up assembly language with no operating system getting in the way). But don't worry! If "bare metal" is not your thing, I'll show you how to safely skip ahead to the next adventure.

Imposter Syndrome, and striving to be "the best of the best", often travel hand-in-hand. Imposter Syndrome remains quite common in our industry. Therefore, I'll show you the likely origin of my own variant and how I slowly reached past its effects. In fact, you may find this perspective the most important part of the book!

About the Author

Edward Barnard

Edward W. Barnard brings unique implementation expertise from programming Cray supercomputers at the hardware level, debugging systems at classified facilities, and solving critical Y2K infrastructure problems. His 20+ years at Cray Research included hands-on work with assembly language, operating systems, and I/O subsystems. He has published over 100 technical articles, helping developers implement solutions to complex problems. His cross-domain experience, from NSA troubleshooting to Saudi Aramco installations, provides practical insights into applying advanced problem-solving techniques across diverse technical environments. 

Edward has transferred his skill of bare-metal programming the Cray I/O Subsystem (with only 131,072 bytes of local memory) to novel ways of managing Large Language Model token context windows, unlocking capabilities not yet taught in AI literature. When a skill dormant for 35 years becomes suddenly relevant again, he calls this The Time Travel Pattern.