A decommissioned Cray-2 computer is on display at the museum.
The Gray-2 was optimized for scientific workloads:
Weather modeling
Nuclear simulations
Cryptanalysis
Fluid dynamics
The Cray-2
The 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, a title formerly held by the Cray X-MP. It was, in turn, surpassed by the Cray Y-MP in 1988.
The Cray-2 was the first of Seymour Cray’s designs to successfully use multiple CPUs.
The dense packaging and resulting heat loads were a major problem for the Cray-2. This was solved in a unique fashion by forcing the electrically inert Fluorinert liquid through the circuitry under pressure and then cooling it outside the processor box. The unique “waterfall” cooler system came to represent high-performance computing in the public eye and was found in many informational films and as a movie prop for some time.
Comparison to later computers In 2012, Piotr Luszczek (a former doctoral student of Jack Dongarra), presented results showing that an iPad 2 matched the historical performance of the Cray-2 on an embedded LINPACK benchmark.
Image by Elder JimZim
Cooling The processor modules were immersed in Fluorinert, a non-conductive liquid coolant. The circular “cushion” wasn’t decorative — it housed the cooling system and power distribution.
*Modern FLOPS: A single high-end GPU (RTX 5090) can deliver tens of teraflops of FP32 (graphics) throughput — that’s thousands of times the Cray-2’s peak. Gaming systems aren’t measured exactly the same way as HPC machines, so direct FLOPS numbers vary by workload and precision.
For those of you who did not live and die in the Cult of the NAND Gate, a FLOPS is Floating Point Operations Per Second.
Backlog in Cray-2 Production
During early production, the Cray fab line was crippled with delays. Our “research” has identified the bottleneck.
Advertising
You may recall the Cray-2 advertising campaign that appeared in all the major defense contractor industry magazines. The ads focused on the enormous computational power of the Cray-2.
Notable Births
Two WLBOTT and WLBOTT-adjacent members were born at Ft. Meade during the height of the cold war.
Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson, the incredible SciFi author was also born at Fr. Meade.
Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and baroque.
Stephenson’s work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes nonfiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury (“J. Frederick George”), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Early life Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father is a professor of electrical engineering and his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory and her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson’s family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960, and to Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He graduated from Ames High School in 1977.
We celebrate Mr. Stephenson by publishing his alma mater’s current lunch menu (way below).
Budget Cuts
Due to recent budget cuts, high birth rates, and signage issues, the Cryptologic Museum was rebranded and repurposed as the Cryptologic / Crypt Museum and Birthing Center.
The “Crypt” aspect of the repurposing added additional security concerns.
Even the trip to the Little Spy’s Room required Level 5 access.
Elder JimZim and Natasha X photographed various exhibits with their hidden spy camera.
