Cray-2The 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.
History of supercomputingThe term supercomputing arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at Columbia University. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
Processeur vectorielvignette|Processeur vectoriel d'un supercalculateur Cray-1. Un processeur vectoriel est un processeur possédant diverses fonctionnalités architecturales lui permettant d'améliorer l’exécution de programmes utilisant massivement des tableaux, des matrices, et qui permet de profiter du parallélisme inhérent à l'usage de ces derniers. Développé pour des applications scientifiques et exploité par les machines Cray et les supercalculateurs qui lui feront suite, ce type d'architecture a rapidement montré ses avantages pour des applications grand public (on peut citer la manipulation d'images).
Cray-1The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies and the cooling system. The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design.
