USA · decommissioned · hpc

Cray-2

Operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore Computing Center .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: -
Rpeak: 1.9 GFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: 4
Power: -
Per watt: - GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- Cray Research, Inc.	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	en.wikipedia.org cs.lbl.gov
CPU	Cray-2 CPU CPUs Cray-2 (custom) · 1C · 0.244 GHz Cray-2 four-processor system	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	4 reported	Reported	en.wikipedia.org cs.lbl.gov
Cooling	Cray-2 Fluorinert immersion cooling Cooling Total immersion in Fluorinert dielectric coolant	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Verified	en.wikipedia.org computerhistory.org

The read

The world's first production Cray-2 (serial number 1) was installed in May 1985 at the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center (NMFECC, the predecessor of today's NERSC), paired with a two-processor X-MP for combined multiprocessing runs. Sources disagree on which laboratory operated NMFECC at the time: Wikipedia's Cray-2 article states Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, matching the general historical record for NMFECC in 1985, while NERSC's own 2024 'firsts' retrospective describes it under Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which only became NERSC's host in 1996. This row follows the 1985-contemporaneous LLNL attribution and flags the discrepancy rather than resolving it. Famous for total Fluorinert immersion cooling (see the cray-2-fluorinert-immersion part), earning the nickname 'Bubbles'; power draw is reported only as a 150-200 kW range, so no discrete power_kw figure is recorded here. Held the world's-fastest title from 1985 to 1987.

Timeline

1985-05 First operational source

Site & facility

Livermore Computing Center

Location: Livermore, CA, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 1996

hpc.llnl.gov llnl.gov

Change history

2026-09-24 Cray-2 added

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
cs.lbl.gov	names system, part and count	Cray-2 CPU, Cray-2 Fluorinert immersion cooling · counts: 4
en.wikipedia.org	names system, part and count	Cray-2 CPU, Cray-2 Fluorinert immersion cooling · counts: 4

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.