NCSA’s Cray-2 installed
NCSA now has two Cray supercomputers to meet the rapidly increasing national demand for computational power in a wide range of fields.
The Cray-2 system joins the Cray X-MP supercomputer to contribute advances in science, engineering, economics, medicine, the humanities, and other fields. The Cray-2 has a 128 million word memory—sixteen times the memory of the X-MP—and has a peak performance speed of 1.7 billion calculations per second—twice as fast as the X-MP.
Many of the studies conducted using the Cray X-MP have been limited to analysis in two dimensions. The Cray-2 system opens up the potential of three-dimensional analysis and other new horizons for researchers studying thunderstorms, the chemistry of large biomolecules, earthquakes, astrophysical events, the design of computer circuits, and hundreds of other problems.