“I am absolutely sure that I was the first [computer science student] in Russia, but I am curious whether it was a university discipline anywhere else in the world before 1951.”
Who he is
Though they're not in everyone's homes yet, supercomputers are pretty common these days. They are used by governments and private industry in everything ranging from military technology to energy distribution. It wasn't always so, and one of the people who had a big contribution in getting us to where we are today is Boris Babayan. He is one of the pioneers of supercomputing and was instrumental in creating and developing supercomputers in the Soviet Union.
Born in Baku, Babayan worked on the teams that developed the early Elbrus supercomputers, which were used in the Soviet Union for its nuclear and space program. He was seen as the Soviet counterpart of the American supercomputer developer Seymour Cray.
Babayan is now a fellow and the Director of Architecture for the Software and Solutions Group at Intel Corporation. He was the second European – and the first outside of western Europe – to gain the Intel Fellow title.
Interesting fact
Babayan and his colleagues developed Elbrus-1, a superscalar computer, in 1978, 15 years before the technology appeared in the West in 1992.
Learn more about him