HPE Buys Cray
HPE buys Cray.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise buys Cray for $1.3 billion.
The deal opens out HPE’s reach with enterprise, government, and academic buyers of high-performance computing systems. The company has a natural ability to speed up commercial supercomputing adoption. It will also lower the cost of Cray's technology such as Slingshot, a high-speed network linking computing nodes into one big supercomputer.
Cray’s systems handle massive data sets, converged modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and analytics workloads. Besides supercomputers, Cray offers high-performance storage, low-latency high-performance HPC interconnects, a full HPC system software stack and programming environment, data analytics, and artificial intelligence solutions – all integrated.
Cray has a $600 million Exascale contract with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the world’s fastest supercomputer. The system will help radical research and artificial intelligence using Cray’s new Shasta system architecture and Slingshot interconnect. The US Department of Energy is working with Cray and AMD to build this massively powerful machine, called Frontier. It will have a performance of 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second. The company was also part of an award with Intel for the first US Exascale contract from Argonne National Laboratory, with Cray’s part of the contract valued at $100 million. This 1.0 exaflops machine is named Aurora.
Raw power is its own attraction. Although mercantile interests have already capitalized the word Exascale, these exascale supercomputer systems do not yet exist. IBM is the maker of the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Summit and Sierra. Sierra is scheduled to be disconnected from the outside world next year so it can be used to manage the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Supercomputers are massively high-powered, high-prestige machines used for simulation. They are essential to astronomy, climate science, medicine, neuroscience, and physics. Projects such as reconstructing the history of the universe, delivering breakthrough medical discoveries, calculating the odds of decades-old nuclear weapons exploding, designing engines and aircraft, preventing cyber-attacks, and predicting future weather patterns.
Antonio Neri of HPE said: ‘Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data. By processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space, and more. Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high-performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work.’
Peter Ungaro of Cray said: ‘This is an opportunity to bring together Cray’s leading-edge technology and HPE’s wide reach and deep product portfolio, providing customers of all sizes with integrated solutions and unique supercomputing technology to address the full spectrum of their data-intensive needs. HPE and Cray share a commitment to customer-centric innovation and a vision to create the global leader for the future of high-performance computing and AI. On behalf of the Cray Board of Directors, we are happy to have reached an agreement that we believe maximizes value and are excited for the opportunities that this unique combination will create for both our employees and our customers.’
Hewlett Packard Enterprise buys Cray for $1.3 billion.
The deal opens out HPE’s reach with enterprise, government, and academic buyers of high-performance computing systems. The company has a natural ability to speed up commercial supercomputing adoption. It will also lower the cost of Cray's technology such as Slingshot, a high-speed network linking computing nodes into one big supercomputer.
Cray’s systems handle massive data sets, converged modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and analytics workloads. Besides supercomputers, Cray offers high-performance storage, low-latency high-performance HPC interconnects, a full HPC system software stack and programming environment, data analytics, and artificial intelligence solutions – all integrated.
Cray has a $600 million Exascale contract with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the world’s fastest supercomputer. The system will help radical research and artificial intelligence using Cray’s new Shasta system architecture and Slingshot interconnect. The US Department of Energy is working with Cray and AMD to build this massively powerful machine, called Frontier. It will have a performance of 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second. The company was also part of an award with Intel for the first US Exascale contract from Argonne National Laboratory, with Cray’s part of the contract valued at $100 million. This 1.0 exaflops machine is named Aurora.
Raw power is its own attraction. Although mercantile interests have already capitalized the word Exascale, these exascale supercomputer systems do not yet exist. IBM is the maker of the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Summit and Sierra. Sierra is scheduled to be disconnected from the outside world next year so it can be used to manage the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Supercomputers are massively high-powered, high-prestige machines used for simulation. They are essential to astronomy, climate science, medicine, neuroscience, and physics. Projects such as reconstructing the history of the universe, delivering breakthrough medical discoveries, calculating the odds of decades-old nuclear weapons exploding, designing engines and aircraft, preventing cyber-attacks, and predicting future weather patterns.
Antonio Neri of HPE said: ‘Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data. By processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space, and more. Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high-performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work.’
Peter Ungaro of Cray said: ‘This is an opportunity to bring together Cray’s leading-edge technology and HPE’s wide reach and deep product portfolio, providing customers of all sizes with integrated solutions and unique supercomputing technology to address the full spectrum of their data-intensive needs. HPE and Cray share a commitment to customer-centric innovation and a vision to create the global leader for the future of high-performance computing and AI. On behalf of the Cray Board of Directors, we are happy to have reached an agreement that we believe maximizes value and are excited for the opportunities that this unique combination will create for both our employees and our customers.’
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