Word: cray
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...cross between a recreation-room bar and an aquarium. Its blue- tinted towers, washed by 200 gallons of liquid coolant, bubble and shimmer / like over-heated Lava Lites. Its nickname is "Bubbles," and it bears little resemblance to the computers that most Americans have seen. But the $17.6 million Cray-2 is a computer -- a supercomputer at that -- and it is the fastest one in operation today...
Last week in a brightly lit room at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., the first production model of the Cray-2 gurgled and glowed, and a nearby printer spewed out a string of characters: s905. B D/U WO/F 06/04 15:24:22 16a. Software Manager Dieter Fuss stared at the message and interpreted it for the assembled Livermore technicians and executives: "It just came alive and said, 'I'm ready...
...that moment, a new era of high-speed computing began. The Cray-2 has the world's largest internal memory capacity (2 billion bytes) and a top speed of 1.2 billion FLOPS (floating point, or arithmetical, operations per second), six to twelve times faster than its predecessor, the Cray-1, and 40,000 to 50,000 times faster than a personal computer. It outdistances the world's half-dozen other supercomputers -- machines specially designed to carry out vast numbers of repetitive calculations at incredible speeds -- and is expected to make short work of problems that have vexed scientists and engineers...
...needs such blinding speed? At the Livermore Lab and NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. (which is scheduled to receive the second Cray-2 in September), the new machines will be used for such projects as studying the intense magnetic fields needed for fusion reactors and designing heat shields for future space probes. Meanwhile, demands for ever faster computers are coming from researchers in nearly every discipline of science and engineering, from astrophysics to automobile design. Using more powerful supercomputers, aircraft manufacturers will be able to simulate the airflow around an entire airplane, simplifying their design task...
...intelligence agencies depend on supercomputers to sort through the enormous quantities of surveillance data beamed home by ground-based listening posts and orbiting spy satellites. By using supercomputers to simulate explosions, nuclear weapons experts require fewer test explosions to validate their designs. Machines like the Cray-2 are essential to any Star Wars defensive system for locating and intercepting incoming missiles before they re-enter the atmosphere...