Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev. Developer and designer of the first computer in the Soviet Union
Outstanding designer of computing technology Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev.
Sergey Alekseevich was born on November 2, 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod.
In 1921, S. A. Lebedev entered the Moscow Higher Technical School. N. E. Bauman at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. At the Institute, S.A. Lebedev immediately joined the scientific work. He specialized in high voltage engineering. His teachers and supervisors were the outstanding Russian scientists in electrical engineering, professors KA Krug, L. I. Sirotinsky, and A. A. Glazunov. All of them took an active part in the development of the famous electrification plan of the USSR - the GOELRO plan. To develop this plan and, most importantly, for its successful implementation, unique theoretical and experimental research was required. Of all the problems that arose during this, S. A. Lebedev, while still a student, focused on the problem of the stability of parallel operation of power plants. And it should be said that he was not mistaken in his choice - all further domestic and foreign experience in creating high-voltage power interconnections defined the stability problem as one of the central ones, and the effectiveness of long-distance power and AC power systems depends on its solution.
')
In April 1928, I received an electrical engineering degree. His thesis, carried out under the guidance of an outstanding scientist K.A. Circle, was devoted to the problem of stability of parallel operation of power plants and had great scientific and practical importance.
S.A. Lebedev became a teacher of MGTU. Bauman and at the same time a senior fellow at the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute. IN AND. Lenin (VEI). Soon he headed the group, and then the laboratory of electrical networks. In those terrible 30s, when sitting up and informing were common, in the department of VEI, which was headed by Sergey Alekseevich, the staff felt confident and calm.
In 1935 he received the title of professor, and in 1939 he defended his doctoral dissertation, not being a candidate of science. It was based on the theory of artificial stability of power systems developed by him.
A remarkable feature of Lebedev’s scientific activity, which appeared from the very beginning, was the organic combination of a great depth of theoretical study with a concrete practical orientation.
Almost every work of a scientist in the field of energy required the creation of computational tools to perform calculations in the process of its implementation or to include them in the composition of the developed devices.
In 1936-1937, work began in his department on creating a differential analyzer for solving differential equations. Even then, S. A. Lebedev thought about the principles of creating digital computers, which would be based on a binary number system.
In connection with the beginning of the war, his department focuses on the defense industry. In September 1941, Sergei Alekseevich evacuated from VEI to Sverdlovsk.
In 1945, Lebedev created the country's first electronic analog computer to solve systems of ordinary differential equations, which are often found in problems related to energy.
The binary system also did not remain out of sight of the scientist. His wife, Alisa Grigorievna, recalls how in the first months of the war in the evenings, when Moscow was plunging into darkness, the husband went to the bathroom and there, by the light of a gas burner, wrote incomprehensible to her units and toe.
In 1946, S.A.Lebedev was elected an academician of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and moved to Kiev. He became director of the Institute of Energy. A year later, on the basis of this institute, two were created - electrical engineering and power engineering. S.A. Lebedev was appointed director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering. Here, together with L.V. Zukernikom S.A. Lebedev carried out research on the management of power systems and the development of automation devices that increase the stability of power systems.
In 1947, the Laboratory of Modeling and Computer Engineering was organized at the Institute of Electrical Engineering
Since the autumn of 1948 S.A. Lebedev began the development of the Small Electronic Calculating Machine (MESM) - the first domestic computer. One year after the start of work (MSEM), a schematic diagram of the blocks of the machine was determined. And soon, MSEM is mounted in a two-story building of a former monastery in Feofaniya.
On November 6, 1950, a test run of the SECM was carried out. Already at this stage, it can solve problems of the form Y '' + Y = 0; Y (0) = 0; Y (?) = 0;
At that time, a similar machine worked only in England - by Maurice Wilks EDSAC, 1949, and the arithmetic unit in EDSAC was consistent.
In March 1950, he was appointed head of the laboratory of the Institute of Fine Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITM and VT), whose director was MA. Lavrentiev.
In parallel, S.A. Lebedev began the development of high-speed electronic counting machine (BESM). The development of the arithmetic unit BESM S.A. Lebedev instructed PP Golovisikov, and control devices - K.S. Neslukhovskomu. The students-trainees from the universities worked on BESM; they completed their diploma works - the design of individual blocks and the description of the relevant sections of the BESM draft design: V.S. Burtsev, V.A. Melnikov, A.G. Laut, I.D. Vizun, A.S. Fedorov and L.A. Orlov. In total, the laboratory number 1 by the spring of 1951, there were about 50 people.
At all stages of the work, Sergei Alekseevich showed a personal example of selflessness. After a busy day at work, he sat for 3-4 o'clock at night at the console or with an oscilloscope, actively participating in debugging the machine.
By December 25, 1951, the MESM was tested and was commissioned by the Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences headed by Academician M.V. Keldysh.
In 1952, the MESM solved the most important scientific and technical problems from the field of thermonuclear processes (Ya.B. Zeldovich), space flights and rocket technology (M.V. Keldysh, A.A. Dorodnitsyn, A.A. Lyapunov), long-range power lines (S.A. Lebedev), mechanics (G.N. Savin), statistical quality control (B.V. Gnedenko).
In April 1951, the State Commission, chaired by M.V. Keldysh accepted the draft designs of BESM and Strela machines.
In the first quarter of 1953, BESM was established, and in April 1953 it was accepted by the State Commission for operation. Due to the shortage of electronic tubes, which were then supplied only for Strela, the BESM operated for the first three years with a memory on acoustic mercury tubes. This reduced the performance of BESM to the level of "Arrows" and added a lot of worries. The mass of mercury for the total volume of FRO should be several hundred kilograms. RZU included 70 mercury tubes about a meter long: 64 stored, one tube followed the clock frequency, 5 were replacement ones. All tubes were placed in a huge thermostat, mounted in a special room with hoods, where work with mercury was performed.
In 1956, the BESM was adopted by the State Commission for the second time - with memory on potentialoscopes.
She performed an average of 8 thousand three-address operations per second. The maximum possible performance was 10 thousand operations per second.
In 1956, the report of S.A. Lebedev on BESM at the international conference in Darmstadt caused a sensation - BESM was at the level of the best American cars and the fastest in Europe.
In 1958, BESM with a memory on ferrite cores with a capacity of 2048 words was transferred to serial production, it was produced under the name of BESM-2 by it. Volodarsky.
In 1953, on the recommendation of MA. Lavrentiev, who became vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, S.. Lebedev was appointed director of ITM and BT. In 1953 he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
In 1955 S.A. Lebedev began the development of the M-20 (the figure in the title indicated the expected response rate - 20 thousand op. / S). Such a speed of calculation then did not have any machine in the world. By the Decree of the Government of the USSR, the creation of the M-20 was entrusted to ITM and VT and SKB-245. S.A. Lebedev became the chief designer, M.K. Sulim (SKB-245) - his deputy. The ideology and structure of the M-20 was developed by S.. Lebedev, the system of commands - .. Shura-Bura, circuitry element base - P.P. Golovistikov. M.K. Sulim led the development of technical documentation and the production of a prototype in SKB-245.
In 1958, the State Commission adopted the M-20 and recommended it for mass production.
For the first time in domestic practice in M-20 S.A. Lebedev, in order to improve performance, implemented automatic address modification, combining the work of an arithmetic unit and selecting commands from memory, introducing a buffer memory for data arrays to be printed, combining input and output data with an account, using fully synchronous transmission of signals in logical circuits.
Later, semiconductor versions of the M-20 were developed, implementing the same architecture: M-220 and M-222 (chief designer - MK Sulim); BESM-3M and BESM-4 (Chief Designer - OP Vasiliev).
ITM and VT after the completion of the BESM-2 and M-20 vacuum tubes began the design of the semiconductor BESM-6, which had a speed of 1 million op. / S. The chief designer of the BESM-6 was S.A. Lebedev, his deputies V.A. Melnikov and L.N. Korolev.
In 1967, the State Commission, chaired by M.V. Keldysh adopted BESM-6 with a high rating and recommended it for mass production.
BESM-6 had full software. Many leading programmers of the country took part in its creation.
On the basis of BESM-6, computer centers for collective use were created for scientific organizations, systems for automating scientific research in nuclear physics and other fields of science, information processing systems for processing information in real time. It was used to model the most complex physical processes and control processes, in software engineering systems for new computers.
BESM-6 was produced by the Moscow Plant of Calculating Analytical Machines (CAM) for 17 years. For the development and implementation of BESM-6 by its creators (from ITM and VT - S. A. Lebedev, V. A. Melnikov, L. N. Korolev, L. A. Zak, V. N. Laut, V. I. Smirnov , A. A. Sokolov, A. N. Tomilin, M. V. Tyapkin, from the CAM plant - V. A. Ivanov, V. Ya. Semeshkin) were awarded the State Prize.
In the early 1970s, Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev could no longer manage the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computing, in 1973, a serious illness forced him to leave the post of director. But he continued to work at home. The Elbrus supercomputer is the latest machine, the basic principles of which were developed by academician Lebedev and his students. He was an ardent opponent of the copying of the American IBM / 360 system that began in the early 70s, which in the Russian version became known as the EU computer. He understood the consequences of this, but he was no longer able to prevent this process.
On July 3, 1974, Petr Petrovich Golovistikov, who arrived from Kiev, visited Sergei Alekseevich in the hospital and told him that he had been to Feofania, where the MESM had been created. Lebedev listened attentively, but did not look at him, but somewhere far away. Petr Petrovich remembered this look for life. Then the gravely ill scientist came to life - perhaps the most difficult, but so memorable with the happiness of the fulfilled intent, the years spent in Kiev were remembered. This day was the last in the life of the great Worker, the genius Scientist, the beautiful Person - Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev. He is buried in the Novodevichy cemetery.
Name S.A. Lebedeva now wears ITM and BT. Pupils S.A. Lebedev created their own scientific schools and groups. A number of his works, unfortunately, remained unfinished. In the main directions outlined with A. Lebedev, whole scientific teams are working.
The result of S.A. Lebedeva was the release of more than 50 scientific papers.
Under his leadership, 15 types of computers were created, starting with the tube (BESM-1, BESM-2, M-20) and ending with modern supercomputers on integrated circuits.
In the year of the ninety-fifth anniversary of the birth of S.A. Lebedev, the recognition of the merits of a scientist from abroad came. As a pioneer of computer technology, he was awarded the Medal of the International Computer Society (IEEE * Computer Society), which says: “Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev. The developer and designer of the first computer in the Soviet Union. "
The Russian Academy of Sciences has established the S. A. Lebedev Prize for outstanding work in the development of computing systems.
Sergey Alekseevich was born on November 2, 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod.
In 1921, S. A. Lebedev entered the Moscow Higher Technical School. N. E. Bauman at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. At the Institute, S.A. Lebedev immediately joined the scientific work. He specialized in high voltage engineering. His teachers and supervisors were the outstanding Russian scientists in electrical engineering, professors KA Krug, L. I. Sirotinsky, and A. A. Glazunov. All of them took an active part in the development of the famous electrification plan of the USSR - the GOELRO plan. To develop this plan and, most importantly, for its successful implementation, unique theoretical and experimental research was required. Of all the problems that arose during this, S. A. Lebedev, while still a student, focused on the problem of the stability of parallel operation of power plants. And it should be said that he was not mistaken in his choice - all further domestic and foreign experience in creating high-voltage power interconnections defined the stability problem as one of the central ones, and the effectiveness of long-distance power and AC power systems depends on its solution.
')
In April 1928, I received an electrical engineering degree. His thesis, carried out under the guidance of an outstanding scientist K.A. Circle, was devoted to the problem of stability of parallel operation of power plants and had great scientific and practical importance.
S.A. Lebedev became a teacher of MGTU. Bauman and at the same time a senior fellow at the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute. IN AND. Lenin (VEI). Soon he headed the group, and then the laboratory of electrical networks. In those terrible 30s, when sitting up and informing were common, in the department of VEI, which was headed by Sergey Alekseevich, the staff felt confident and calm.
In 1935 he received the title of professor, and in 1939 he defended his doctoral dissertation, not being a candidate of science. It was based on the theory of artificial stability of power systems developed by him.
A remarkable feature of Lebedev’s scientific activity, which appeared from the very beginning, was the organic combination of a great depth of theoretical study with a concrete practical orientation.
Almost every work of a scientist in the field of energy required the creation of computational tools to perform calculations in the process of its implementation or to include them in the composition of the developed devices.
In 1936-1937, work began in his department on creating a differential analyzer for solving differential equations. Even then, S. A. Lebedev thought about the principles of creating digital computers, which would be based on a binary number system.
In connection with the beginning of the war, his department focuses on the defense industry. In September 1941, Sergei Alekseevich evacuated from VEI to Sverdlovsk.
In 1945, Lebedev created the country's first electronic analog computer to solve systems of ordinary differential equations, which are often found in problems related to energy.
The binary system also did not remain out of sight of the scientist. His wife, Alisa Grigorievna, recalls how in the first months of the war in the evenings, when Moscow was plunging into darkness, the husband went to the bathroom and there, by the light of a gas burner, wrote incomprehensible to her units and toe.
In 1946, S.A.Lebedev was elected an academician of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and moved to Kiev. He became director of the Institute of Energy. A year later, on the basis of this institute, two were created - electrical engineering and power engineering. S.A. Lebedev was appointed director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering. Here, together with L.V. Zukernikom S.A. Lebedev carried out research on the management of power systems and the development of automation devices that increase the stability of power systems.
In 1947, the Laboratory of Modeling and Computer Engineering was organized at the Institute of Electrical Engineering
Since the autumn of 1948 S.A. Lebedev began the development of the Small Electronic Calculating Machine (MESM) - the first domestic computer. One year after the start of work (MSEM), a schematic diagram of the blocks of the machine was determined. And soon, MSEM is mounted in a two-story building of a former monastery in Feofaniya.
On November 6, 1950, a test run of the SECM was carried out. Already at this stage, it can solve problems of the form Y '' + Y = 0; Y (0) = 0; Y (?) = 0;
At that time, a similar machine worked only in England - by Maurice Wilks EDSAC, 1949, and the arithmetic unit in EDSAC was consistent.
In March 1950, he was appointed head of the laboratory of the Institute of Fine Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITM and VT), whose director was MA. Lavrentiev.
In parallel, S.A. Lebedev began the development of high-speed electronic counting machine (BESM). The development of the arithmetic unit BESM S.A. Lebedev instructed PP Golovisikov, and control devices - K.S. Neslukhovskomu. The students-trainees from the universities worked on BESM; they completed their diploma works - the design of individual blocks and the description of the relevant sections of the BESM draft design: V.S. Burtsev, V.A. Melnikov, A.G. Laut, I.D. Vizun, A.S. Fedorov and L.A. Orlov. In total, the laboratory number 1 by the spring of 1951, there were about 50 people.
At all stages of the work, Sergei Alekseevich showed a personal example of selflessness. After a busy day at work, he sat for 3-4 o'clock at night at the console or with an oscilloscope, actively participating in debugging the machine.
By December 25, 1951, the MESM was tested and was commissioned by the Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences headed by Academician M.V. Keldysh.
In 1952, the MESM solved the most important scientific and technical problems from the field of thermonuclear processes (Ya.B. Zeldovich), space flights and rocket technology (M.V. Keldysh, A.A. Dorodnitsyn, A.A. Lyapunov), long-range power lines (S.A. Lebedev), mechanics (G.N. Savin), statistical quality control (B.V. Gnedenko).
In April 1951, the State Commission, chaired by M.V. Keldysh accepted the draft designs of BESM and Strela machines.
In the first quarter of 1953, BESM was established, and in April 1953 it was accepted by the State Commission for operation. Due to the shortage of electronic tubes, which were then supplied only for Strela, the BESM operated for the first three years with a memory on acoustic mercury tubes. This reduced the performance of BESM to the level of "Arrows" and added a lot of worries. The mass of mercury for the total volume of FRO should be several hundred kilograms. RZU included 70 mercury tubes about a meter long: 64 stored, one tube followed the clock frequency, 5 were replacement ones. All tubes were placed in a huge thermostat, mounted in a special room with hoods, where work with mercury was performed.
In 1956, the BESM was adopted by the State Commission for the second time - with memory on potentialoscopes.
She performed an average of 8 thousand three-address operations per second. The maximum possible performance was 10 thousand operations per second.
In 1956, the report of S.A. Lebedev on BESM at the international conference in Darmstadt caused a sensation - BESM was at the level of the best American cars and the fastest in Europe.
In 1958, BESM with a memory on ferrite cores with a capacity of 2048 words was transferred to serial production, it was produced under the name of BESM-2 by it. Volodarsky.
In 1953, on the recommendation of MA. Lavrentiev, who became vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, S.. Lebedev was appointed director of ITM and BT. In 1953 he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
In 1955 S.A. Lebedev began the development of the M-20 (the figure in the title indicated the expected response rate - 20 thousand op. / S). Such a speed of calculation then did not have any machine in the world. By the Decree of the Government of the USSR, the creation of the M-20 was entrusted to ITM and VT and SKB-245. S.A. Lebedev became the chief designer, M.K. Sulim (SKB-245) - his deputy. The ideology and structure of the M-20 was developed by S.. Lebedev, the system of commands - .. Shura-Bura, circuitry element base - P.P. Golovistikov. M.K. Sulim led the development of technical documentation and the production of a prototype in SKB-245.
In 1958, the State Commission adopted the M-20 and recommended it for mass production.
For the first time in domestic practice in M-20 S.A. Lebedev, in order to improve performance, implemented automatic address modification, combining the work of an arithmetic unit and selecting commands from memory, introducing a buffer memory for data arrays to be printed, combining input and output data with an account, using fully synchronous transmission of signals in logical circuits.
Later, semiconductor versions of the M-20 were developed, implementing the same architecture: M-220 and M-222 (chief designer - MK Sulim); BESM-3M and BESM-4 (Chief Designer - OP Vasiliev).
ITM and VT after the completion of the BESM-2 and M-20 vacuum tubes began the design of the semiconductor BESM-6, which had a speed of 1 million op. / S. The chief designer of the BESM-6 was S.A. Lebedev, his deputies V.A. Melnikov and L.N. Korolev.
In 1967, the State Commission, chaired by M.V. Keldysh adopted BESM-6 with a high rating and recommended it for mass production.
BESM-6 had full software. Many leading programmers of the country took part in its creation.
On the basis of BESM-6, computer centers for collective use were created for scientific organizations, systems for automating scientific research in nuclear physics and other fields of science, information processing systems for processing information in real time. It was used to model the most complex physical processes and control processes, in software engineering systems for new computers.
BESM-6 was produced by the Moscow Plant of Calculating Analytical Machines (CAM) for 17 years. For the development and implementation of BESM-6 by its creators (from ITM and VT - S. A. Lebedev, V. A. Melnikov, L. N. Korolev, L. A. Zak, V. N. Laut, V. I. Smirnov , A. A. Sokolov, A. N. Tomilin, M. V. Tyapkin, from the CAM plant - V. A. Ivanov, V. Ya. Semeshkin) were awarded the State Prize.
In the early 1970s, Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev could no longer manage the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computing, in 1973, a serious illness forced him to leave the post of director. But he continued to work at home. The Elbrus supercomputer is the latest machine, the basic principles of which were developed by academician Lebedev and his students. He was an ardent opponent of the copying of the American IBM / 360 system that began in the early 70s, which in the Russian version became known as the EU computer. He understood the consequences of this, but he was no longer able to prevent this process.
On July 3, 1974, Petr Petrovich Golovistikov, who arrived from Kiev, visited Sergei Alekseevich in the hospital and told him that he had been to Feofania, where the MESM had been created. Lebedev listened attentively, but did not look at him, but somewhere far away. Petr Petrovich remembered this look for life. Then the gravely ill scientist came to life - perhaps the most difficult, but so memorable with the happiness of the fulfilled intent, the years spent in Kiev were remembered. This day was the last in the life of the great Worker, the genius Scientist, the beautiful Person - Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev. He is buried in the Novodevichy cemetery.
Name S.A. Lebedeva now wears ITM and BT. Pupils S.A. Lebedev created their own scientific schools and groups. A number of his works, unfortunately, remained unfinished. In the main directions outlined with A. Lebedev, whole scientific teams are working.
The result of S.A. Lebedeva was the release of more than 50 scientific papers.
Under his leadership, 15 types of computers were created, starting with the tube (BESM-1, BESM-2, M-20) and ending with modern supercomputers on integrated circuits.
In the year of the ninety-fifth anniversary of the birth of S.A. Lebedev, the recognition of the merits of a scientist from abroad came. As a pioneer of computer technology, he was awarded the Medal of the International Computer Society (IEEE * Computer Society), which says: “Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev. The developer and designer of the first computer in the Soviet Union. "
The Russian Academy of Sciences has established the S. A. Lebedev Prize for outstanding work in the development of computing systems.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/81207/
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