The dynamic dexterity is an important issue for manipulator design, some indices were proposed for analyzing dynamic dexterity, but they can evaluate the dynamic performance just at one pose in the workspace of the manipulator, and can't be applied to dynamic design expediently. Much work has been done in the kinematic optimization, but the work in the dynamic optimization is much less. A global dynamic condition number index is proposed and applied to the dynamic optimization design the parallel manipulator. This paper deals with the dynamic manipulability and dynamic optimization of a two degree-of-freedom (DOF) parallel manipulator. The particular velocity and particular angular velocity matrices of each moving part about the part's pivot point are derived from the kinematic formulation of the manipulator, and the inertial force and inertial movement are obtained utilizing Newton-Euler formulation, then the inverse dynamic model of the parallel manipulator is proposed based on the virtual work principle. The general inertial ellipsoid and dynamic manipulability ellipsoid are applied to evaluate the dynamic performance of the manipulator, a global dynamic condition number index based on the condition number of general inertial matrix in the workspace is proposed, and then the link lengths of the manipulator is redesigned to optimize the dynamic manipulability by this index. The dynamic manipulability of the origin mechanism and the optimized mechanism are compared, the result shows that the optimized one is much better. The global dynamic condition number index has good effect in evaluating the dynamic dexterity of the whole workspace, and is efficient in the dynamic optimal design of the parallel manipulator.