jeffquitney
patreon
Cray 2: Worlds Most Powerful Computer 1986 NASA Ames Research Center (ARC)
🕑 Added 2020-03-13 18:25:32 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
'The use of the Cray 2 supercomputer, the fastest computer in the world, at ARC is detailed. The Cray 2 can perform 250 million calculations per second and has 10 times the memory of any other computer. Ames researchers are shown creating computer simulations of aircraft airflow, waterflow around a submarine, and fuel flow inside of the Space Shuttle's engines. The video also details the Cray 2's use in calculating airflow around the Shuttle and its external rockets during liftoff for the first time and in the development of the National Aero Space Plane. Released Oct. 1986.'
Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. It was, in turn, replaced in that spot by the Cray Y-MP in 1988.
The Cray-2 was the first of Seymour Cray's designs to successfully use multiple CPUs. This had been attempted in the CDC 8600 in the early 1970s, but the emitter-coupled logic (ECL) transistors of the era were too difficult to package into a working machine. The Cray-2 addressed this through the use of ECL integrated circuits, packing them in a novel 3D wiring that greatly increased circuit density.
The dense packaging and resulting heat loads were a major problem for the Cray-2. This was solved in a unique fashion by forcing the electrically inert Fluorinert liquid through the circuitry under pressure and then cooling it outside the processor box. The unique "waterfall" cooler system came to represent high-performance computing in the public eye and was found in many informational films and as a movie prop for some time.
Unlike the original Cray-1, the Cray-2 had difficulties delivering peak performance. Other machines from the company, like the X-MP and Y-MP, outsold the Cray-2 by a wide margin. When Cray began development of the Cray-3, the company chose to develop the Cray C90 series instead. This is the same sequence of events that occurred when the 8600 was being developed, and as in that case, Cray left the company...
Uses and successors
The Cray-2 was predominantly developed for the United States Departments of Defense and Energy. Uses tended to be for nuclear weapons research or oceanographic (sonar) development. However, the first Cray-2 (serial number 1) was used at the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for unclassified energy research. It also found its way into civil agencies (such as NASA Ames Research Center), universities, and corporations worldwide. For example, Ford and General Motors both used the Cray-2 for processing complex Finite Element Analysis models of car bodyshells, and for performing virtual crash testing of bodyshell components prior to production.
The Cray-2 would have been superseded by the Cray-3, but due to development problems only a single Cray-3 was built and it was never paid for. The spiritual descendant of the Cray-2 is the Cray X1, offered by Cray.
Comparison to later computers
In 2012, Piotr Luszczek (a former doctoral student of Jack Dongarra), presented results showing that an iPad 2 matched the historical performance of the Cray-2 on an embedded LINPACK benchmark.
Trivia
Due to the use of liquid cooling, the Cray-2 was given the nickname "Bubbles", and common jokes around the computer made reference to this unique system. Gags included "No Fishing" signs, cardboard depictions of the Loch Ness Monster rising out of the heat exchanger tank, plastic fish inside the exchanger, etc. The power consumption of the Cray-2 was 150–200 kW. Research conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1990s indicated that to a limited extent the perfluorinated polyether used to cool Cray-2 circuits would break down to form the extremely toxic gas perfluoroisobutylene...
Each vertical stack of logic modules sat above a stack of power modules which powered 5 volt busbars, each of which delivered about 2200 amps. The Cray-2 was powered by two motor-generators, which took in 480 V three-phase...
