Vladimir Melnikov

Vladimir Melnikov was born in Venyukovo, Moscow region, and went on to study automation and telemechanics at the Moscow Energy Institute.

Melnikov took an active part in developing and debugging the BESM, which at 8,000-10,000 operations per second ranked among the world's fastest machines in the mid-1950s; it reached full design speed in 1956 with potentialoscope memory.

As Lebedev's deputy (with Lev Korolev), Melnikov co-designed the million-operations-per-second BESM-6: a pipeline handling up to 14 instructions at once, virtual addressing, memory protection and multiprogramming. His work with the factory meant the machine needed essentially no rework for series production, which ran seventeen years.

Melnikov received the USSR State Prize as part of the BESM-6 design team.

After Lebedev steps back, the institute is said to have chosen Vsevolod Burtsev's Elbrus concept over a BESM-10 proposal. Lebedev himself had argued heatedly against a multiprocessor Elbrus; Glushkov backed both. The supercomputer line is named after the mountain Lebedev climbed at 35.

Melnikov became a twice-decorated State Prize laureate; he also held the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labour and the Ukrainian Academy's Lebedev Prize.

When the Academy opened its informatics division, Melnikov organized the new institute and became its director, driving the Elektronika SSBIS, a vector-pipeline supercomputer whose instruction set was close to that of the Cray-1.

Perestroika and the long economic crisis that followed stopped the Elektronika SSBIS before completion. Melnikov died in Moscow and was buried at the Troyekurovskoye cemetery; a research foundation now bears his name.