Scientists in government, industry and academia involved in the race to build the world’s fastest computing machines are now turning their attention once again to Seymour Cray’s elegant approach to building ultra-fast computers. The designs use special hardware that to handle the long strings of numbers in complex scientific computing problems.

Cray’s revival was helped by funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop prototypes of the next generation of supercomputers that can reach peak speeds of a petaflop — quadrillion mathematical operations per second — by the end of this decade.