CDC at UT Austin and IBM at Exxon Houston

There's a curious parallel between UT Austin's CDC hardware and Exxon Houston's IBM hardware during the sixties and seventies, bookended by a shared IBM era in the fifties and a shared Cray era in the eighties. CDC and Cray were members of a family of Minnesota companies (ERA, CDC, Cray) that, along with its UNIVAC relatives, was a vigorous competitor to IBM in the engineering, scientific, national lab, and cryptography fields. In a sense, UT Austin moved from IBM to the ERA tradition in the sixties, and Exxon Houston followed in the eighties. UT Austin's early move was due to David Young's being firmly in the ERA tradition from his work at Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW) in the fifties. He arrived at UT in 1958 and led the acquisition of the CDC 1604 in 1960 and CDC 6600 in 1966. The CDC Cyber hardware that UT acquired in the seventies was essentially updated versions of the CDC 6600, based on the same 60-bit architecture and running similar code.

There were multiple important connections between computing at UT Austin, Exxon, Rice, and Houston. A sign of these connections was the story of how, in 1958, Humble Oil in Houston (now Exxon) donated its IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator to UT Austin. UT’s Al Matsen was a consultant for Exxon Houston and New Jersey for over thirty-five years. The CPC was a landmark gift and a direct result of Matsen’s extensive ties. To bypass bureaucratic paperwork, Matsen, his graduate students, and other faculty physically carried the heavy machine components into Welch and installed it themselves. Exxon had acquired the CPC in 1952 and used it to implement ground-breaking subsurface reservoir simulations and the beginnings of the ADI Alternating Direction Implicit techniques for Finite Difference Methods. This work put Exxon, Rice University, and Houston in a leading position for subsurface modeling and computational engineering and science.

ADI was forged in late 1953 out of urgent commercial necessity by Peaceman, Rachford, and Douglas. Driven by the pragmatic need to simulate oil reservoirs for high-stakes drilling decisions, they bypassed academic idealism in favor of industrial utility. Rather than chasing elegant theorems, they engineered ADI as a brilliant, gritty algorithmic hack, splitting complex multi-dimensional problems into a sequence of cheap, one-dimensional coordinate sweeps to circumvent both the memory bottlenecks of early hardware and the finicky tuning required by SOR. The alignment of the oil men with IBM, and David Young’s association with UNIVAC and Control Data Corporation, mirrors the structural, financial, and philosophical divides of the early computing era. The hardware allegiances shape parallel corporate histories through distinct computing cultures. The hardware mirrored the software. The oil men used IBM's corporate mainframes to run a gritty, practical algorithm aimed at maximizing immediate business profits. David Young and the aerospace work at TRW used UNIVAC and CDC's scientific machines. [1]

Exxon donated its IBM CPC to UT in 1958. The CDC Cyber was essentially an updated CDC 6600. By the eighties, both UT and Exxon were in the ERA tradition with Cray hardware.

Is this Seymour Cray during installation of the CDC 6600 in 1966? Genuine question, as it does seem at least possible.

Official event for the CDC 6600 in 1966. David Young is at the very top center, somewhat less visible because of lack of contrast against the background. Curiously, Al Matsen seems not to be present in this photo. Both Young and Matsen are variously described as founders and heads of the UT Computation Center.

[1] SOR Successive Over-Relaxation and the work of David Young at TRW were prominently applied to fluid and heat flows for atmospheric reentry vehicles. At the same time, ADI Alternate Direction Implicit was being applied to fluid and heat flows for the oil industry in Houston. This was all in the mid and late fifties, and among the most important early applications of computers in modeling and simulation, alongside Dantzig's work on Simplex at RAND.

[2] For more about Exxon Houston, A Personal Retrospection of Reservoir Simulation, Donald Peaceman 

[3] The photos above related to the CDC 6600 are thanks to the Briscoe Center 

[4] Here's an excellent new post about the IBM CPC from the always top-notch Ken Shirriff.