The second major
supercomputer produced by
Cray Research, Inc. Designed by no other than
Seymour Cray. Became available in 1985.
The Cray-2 contained a foreground processor which performed system tasks, I/O handling, and synchronization of the background processors, and the vector processors. The number of background processors which do the actual computational work ranged from one to four. The clock cycle is 4.1 ns.
The cooling system for the Cray-2 was much more ambitious than its predecessor, the Cray-1. It utilitized a liquid immersion cooling system in which the computing modules were packed into tank of liquid fluorinert. This fluorinert would boil and was then re-cooled by a water tower refrigeration system.
The Cray-2 featured a memory size of 4 gigabytes, which at the time was astronomical, and still very large by today's standards.
A typical Cray-2 had a peak crunching rate of 1.4 gigaflops.
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