2 ms·

and 300KW of power to run it!

• jwr 12y ago
  And don't forget that you also have to get rid of 300kW of heat. Having worked in a supercomputing center, this is a major problem — think about how quickly you have to shut your computers down if your heat exchanger goes down, before the room gets too hot to enter.
  • TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    100 domestic fan heaters running at the same time? Toasty... It's not that the Cray 2 isn't amazing, it's that modern chip tech puts at least that much power in your pocket, while desktop chips are far faster. Aaaaand - it's all air cooled and apparently effortless, and the CPU does it all with <100W or so, and it's so cheap almost anyone can buy it. Really, that's at least as amazing as the Cray series.
  • frozenport 12y ago
    Roomer has it that the original Cray 1 design didn't have a tunable cooling unit. One day the test machine crashed, and the engineers came in the next morning to see a giant icy glacier.