Oil crisis stalled cars, but jumpstarted a supercomputing revolution
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Obtaining Equipment
The CTR Center was to begin operating in 1975, but obtaining the computer presented a challenge. The General Services Administration (GSA), the federal government’s acquisition agency, suggested that the fusion program use 10 existing GSA computers at locations around the country when they were available. Trivelpiece found this arrangement unacceptable.
Since the center would be located at Livermore Lab, Trivelpiece decided the lab should buy the mainframe, remote site computers and telecommunications equipment. He argued that Livermore routinely made purchases of this scope and it would be difficult for the AEC headquarters to do the same thing quickly.
“I fell on my sword on this matter and prevailed,” Trivelpiece says. The CTR Center began operating a CDC 7600, with 50-kilobit links initially connecting remote users at other major labs. This is about what free dial-up connections provide today, but was lightning fast 30 years ago.
Trivelpiece gives the most credit for creation of the CTR Center to Johnny Abbadessa, the AEC comptroller at the time.
“There wouldn’t have been a CTR or MFE Center without him,” Trivelpiece says. Abbadessa was intrigued by the idea of a central computer connected to multiple sites as a way to make better computing resources available to more scientists and engineers throughout the weapons lab complex.
The Evolution
In 1976 the CTR Computer Center was renamed the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center (NMFECC). Steps were taken to acquire a Cray-1, a supercomputer four times as fast as the CDC 7600 and packed with more memory.
Additional remote sites were added at the University of California–Los Angeles and the University of California–Berkeley. This was also the start of the Magnetic Fusion Energy Network (MFEnet), a satellite network connecting Livermore to a handful of key national laboratories. Numerous tail circuits linked those labs to other fusion energy sites.
The much-anticipated Cray-1 arrived in May 1978. Because software for the CDC 7600 was homegrown, the NMFECC undertook a major project to convert the 7600 operating system (called the Livermore Time Sharing System, or LTSS) and other codes to run on the new machine.
The resulting Cray Time Sharing System (CTSS) provided 24-hour reliability. It allowed interactive use of the Cray-1, and six other computer centers adopted it.
