Cray-2 Overview, extracted from "Cray Channels"

[Arnold Robbins]

My office mate gets "Cray Channels", the Cray corporation newsletter.  Mostly
it is a lot of flag waving about how wonderful Cray computers are, the kinds
of problems they're being used for, who has most recently ordered a Cray,
and stuff like that.  This month though, in addition to all that, they have a
four page overview of the new Cray 2.  I thought that the net might be
interested in some of the more interesting details of the biggest "Unix box."

[flame retardent: I have no connection with Cray Research, other than reading
their publication.  I doubt that this could be construed as advertising,
since the price of a CRAY-2 is probably beyond the budgets of most everyone
on the net.]

The first paragraph sums it up:

	A pioneer in the use of liquid immersion cooling technology,
	the CRAY-2 features a 256-million word [8 8-bit bytes to a word]
	Common Memory, four independent processors and a 4.1 nanosecond
	clock cycle -- all in a package just 45 inches tall and 53 inches
	in diameter.  The CRAY-2 delivers effective CPU speed six to twelve
	times that of the CRAY-1 and runs an operating system based on
	AT&T's widely accepted UNIX(tm) System V.

Hardware:

There are four identical background processors, each more powerful than
a CRAY-1, and each with a high speed Local Memory.  There is a Foreground
Processor, 256 million words of Common Memory, and a maintenance console.
One CRAY-2 has more memory than all CRAY-1 and CRAY X-MP computers installed
to date! (they just shipped their 100th system)

The Foreground Processor supervises all I/O, its activity, and that of the
four background processors. Up to 40 I/O devices (ten per channel) are
allowed. This is typically 9 disk drives and 1 adapter per channel.

The cooling medium (colorless, oderless, non-toxic, non-flammable, inert
fluorocarbon liquid) is in direct contact with the components of the mainframe.
This allows for excellent heat dissipation, giving greater reliability.
"In fact, chip termperatures on the CRAY-2 are substantially lower than those
achieved by other types of cooling and result in significantly reduced chip
failure rates."

For maintenance, diagnostic software isolates the failure, and the immersion
fluid is pumped into a resevoir, so that the front panel can be removed,
and the component replaced. "The entire operation requires only a few
minutes. Once the system is restarted, further diagnosis and repair of the
module can occur on-site at the maintenance station."

The entire Cray 2 weighs about 5500 pounds, 2000 of which is the coolant.
(That's about 2500 kilograms, of which 900 is coolant for those who
think metric.)

The software is summed in a table, which I think I'll just quote verbatim:
[my comments in brackets, like these]

      o	The CRAY-2 Operating System, based on the proven UNIX System V
	and enhanced to fit the large-scale scientific environement.
	[User multi-tasking, asynchronous I/O, effecient use of very
	large data files.]

      o	CFT Version 2, a vectorizing and optimizing FORTRAN compiler.

      o	A FORTRAN standard mathematical and I/O subroutine library.

      o	A scientific subroutine library optimized for the CRAY-2.

      o	A multitasking library that allows user partitioning of an
	application into concurrently executing tasks.

      o	A wide variety of system utilities to support the needs of
	interactive and batch processing.

      o	A C language compiler that supports the needs of system
	software written in C.

      o	CAL Version 2, the CRAY macro assembler, which provides access
	to all CRAY-2 instructions. [Instruction syntax and macro
	capability highly compatible with the CRAY-1 assembler]

That gives the gist.  The picture is pretty neat, too.  Wouldn't that make
a nice machine to have in my office!

This month's issue is Volume 7, Number 2.  Subscription requests, feature
story ideas, and news items may be mailed to

	CRAY CHANNELS
	Cray Research, Inc.
	608 Second Avenue South
	Minneapolis, MN 55402

Who needs an IBM 3090 with VM/IX when you can have a CRAY-2?
-- 
Arnold Robbins
CSNET:	arnold at gatech	ARPA:	arnold%gatech.csnet at csnet-relay.arpa
UUCP:	{ akgua, allegra, hplabs, ihnp4, seismo, ut-sally }!gatech!arnold

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