Preaching at the temple of the god of numbers

Press, 22 April 1987, Page 16

Preaching at the temple of the god of numbers

By

ROGER HIGHFIELD,

of the ‘Daily Telegraph’

Kent Koeninger is an evangelist who preaches in an airconditioned temple in Silicon Valley, California. He worships an icon — a symbol representing a file — on his Apple Macintosh computer. His place of worship is somewhere on the "Apple Campus,” a group of anonymous lowrise buildings in Cupertino, where Californian culture mixes with leading-edge technology.

produce the fastest graphics in the world.

Via a network of small Apple Macintosh. computers, the Cray will be put to a surprising number of uses, among them designing software, circuits and the operating system of the Apple of the future. It will simulate air flows over the “heads” used to read information stored on magnetic discs; the plastics moulding processes; and the way the machine is manufactured by Robots. The Cray will even be used to design the computer’s casing and simulate how it will behave if dropped or bashed in a “crash test” Most important it will produce the fastest graphics in the world, churning out some 100 million chunks of information each second to build up pictures. This is equivalent to producing a high quality picture on a television — twice the resolution of a home TV — 15 times a second. By using such a vast machine Apple hopes to find out what graphics can offer in general, the first step .towards designing graphics for its next personal computer. Mr Koeninger would not say when the Cray-designed personal computer will appear, but is adamant on one point: “If it is not in the market within five years, we are out of business.”

But to Mr Koeninger it is just another personal computer, a view in line with Apple’s philosophy: “Apple believes in one person one machine — Including the Cray. We often only have one person on it, - using it to full capacity.” Mr Koeninger, who dresses in the standard Silicon Valley boffin’s garb of corduroys, sweat shirt and sneakers, is much more concerned with the outward appearance of his Cray XMP4B, which he calls the “monster.”

Here he communicates with his god — a SNZ3O million Cray supercomputer. Mr Koeninger’s official title is Cray Evangelist and, for him, working on the Cray is a religious experience. "I am responsible for making sure the Cray is a good product for Apple and that Apple know they have a good product That is called an evangelist here.” There are others — hardware evangelists, software evangelists and so on. The strange job titles do not end there — their secretaries go by the name of "Area One of the world’s fastest computers, Cray can number-crunch at a rate of 800 million additions and multiplications per second. This giant machine, made by Cray Research Inc. of Minneapolis, is being put to work designing Apple’s next personal computer has just been to

“Cray offered us a choice of 2000 colours but we didn’t like any of them. They sent it out in bare metal and we had it painted ourselves." It is now a lurid purpje. Apple’s Advanced Technology building is opposite its gym and sauna. While approching the Cray down a striking corridor tiled in black and white, and lit by art deco blue lamps, Mr Koeninger talked excitedly of megaflops and megabytes. Apple is the only company to call on a supercomputer to design the next generation of personal computer, which is likely to be as powerful as machines currently used in universities, yet cost a fraction of the