Cold War Computing

Posted on 3 Aug 2005 at 12:39

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 1 of 5

Gallery

Lebedev has been described as a genius and "the Soviet Alan Turing". Archives at the National Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine show that Lebedev made steady progress despite not having access to Western knowledge. He began thinking about how to build a computer in 1948 and by the end of 1949 had the basic principles worked out. Once the lab was ready, progress was swift.

Rostislav Chernjak, one of the few living members of the original team, remembers the lab. "On the second floor was the laboratory and a larger room where we assembled the computer. It needed seven kilowatts of power so it was very hot and we needed cooling. We demolished a wall to make the room bigger, but that wasn't enough. So we took the roof off."

The machine they constructed was called MESM, which is short for 'small electronic counting machine' in Russian. It contained over 6,000 vacuum tubes and had its own small power station to overcome local supply difficulties. But running at just 3KHz, its performance was poor. Lebedev's team realised that reading the results on its output display lamps was difficult and could produce errors, so they decided to invent their own printer. A resourceful engineer called Boris Malanovsky was responsible for cannibalising a number of printing cash registers to provide the necessary hardware.

THE FIRST PROGRAM

MESM ran its first test program in November 1950. The first program was a ballistics problem. To test the machine, MESM and two mathematicians, working in isolation, had to solve the problem:

Y"+Y=0; Y(0)=0; Y(π)=0

Lebedev quickly realised that MESM's results were different to those of its human counterparts. After a day spent checking the machine, Lebedev stayed up all night trying to find the source of the problem. By the following morning, he had found it. The machine was right, and the mathematicians had both made the same subtle mistake.

MESM finally went into service on Christmas Eve 1951, making it arguably the first electronic computer in continental Europe and certainly the first within the Eastern Bloc. To put the machine's 3KHz speed into perspective, Alan Turing's Pilot Model Ace already ran at 1MHz. Even so, MESM received a flood of secretive visitors keen to perform equally mysterious calculations. Thanks to the end of the Cold War, we can now piece together what those calculations were.

At a time when enriched uranium was scarce and the physics behind making it explode were only vaguely understood, development of nuclear weapons was high on the Russian government's list of priorities. Far larger explosions than the 'simple' atomic type could be created using an atomic bomb to fuse together hydrogen atoms to form a massive thermonuclear reaction. But the only way to be reasonably sure a fusion bomb would work was to model the complex sub-atomic processes involved.

According to the sociologist Slava Gerovitch, writing in the April 2001 edition of the journal Social Studies of Science, the atomic bomb - then the most potent symbol of political and military power - showed the clear superiority of Western physics. In the eyes of many Soviet officials, this state of affairs could not stand.

Then there was the problem of building a missile capable of firing such weapons accurately. The physics of inter-continental ballistics required large amounts of number crunching. At the time, the only source was Lebedev's Secret Laboratory Number One.

THE BIG PICTURE

MESM was a groundbreaking proof-of-concept machine that opened the floodgates for Russian Cold War science. But its successor, the large electronic computing machine, or BESM, made an even bigger impact.