Cray-2 supercomputer (1985)
Second in a memorable line of supercomputers, the Cray-2 was developed to process huge quantities of data. Of the series of 30 Cray-2s delivered throughout the world from 1985, fourteen machines were still in service ten years later.
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,
It had four vector processors built with emitter-coupled logic. At 1.9 GFLOPS (FLoating-point Operations Per Second) peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released.
To give some sort of reference to today, as of June 20, 2016, China's Sunway TaihuLight was ranked with 93 petaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark (out of 125 peak petaFLOPS). It's located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.
Cray-2 supercomputer (1985)
Second in a memorable line of supercomputers, the Cray-2 was developed to process huge quantities of data. Of the series of 30 Cray-2s delivered throughout the world from 1985, fourteen machines were still in service ten years later.
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,
It had four vector processors built with emitter-coupled logic. At 1.9 GFLOPS (FLoating-point Operations Per Second) peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released.
To give some sort of reference to today, as of June 20, 2016, China's Sunway TaihuLight was ranked with 93 petaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark (out of 125 peak petaFLOPS). It's located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.