The National Energy Research Supercomputer Centre at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reckons that its new Cray 2 is one of a kind – the first and likely the only Cray 2 to be equipped with eight processors: produced before Cray Research Inc’s Big Bang that created two companies, the new supercomputer was supplied by the new Cray Computer Co in Colorado Springs; valued at $19m, the Cray 2 has a theoretical peak speed of 4 GFLOPs and it is fitted with 64M-words of memory, to be doubled to 128Mb words within a few months; the machine will inter alia be used to study the prospects and effects of global warming – studying the entire earth in 60 mile by 60 mile sectors, something that would require 360 hours of computer time on a Cray 1 per simulated year of climate effects, but only 30 hours on the eight-processor Cray 2.
