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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 05 2016, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the boil-the-crustacean-next-time dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Cray has revealed that its products' Q2 profits have literally gone up in smoke.

The company this week announced second quarter revenue of US$100.2m, down from $186.2m in 2015's corresponding quarter. That dip meant the company incurred a loss of $13.1m compared to last year's $5.8m profit.

Things aren't going to be much easier in Q3, due to “a very recent electrical smoke event caused by a failed manufacturing facility power component that will delay the Company's ability to deliver on some customer contracts in 2016, including an impact on anticipated third quarter revenue.”

On the company's earnings call CEO Peter Ungaro said the smoke “damaged five relatively smaller customer systems that were being tested and prep[ped] for shipping, and for which we expected to achieve acceptances before the end of the year including some in the third quarter.”

“Some of these systems were key pieces of larger customer solutions,” he added. “And as a result, their impact to our overall revenue outlook was more significant than just the value of the revenue type to those systems themselves. This event just happened and we're still evaluating the full extent of the impact, as well as our recovery plan. But I want to note that the majority of the loss is expected to be covered by insurance."


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @11:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @11:54AM (#384458)

    But but The Cloud should have killed Cray by now. Killed it dead. The Cloud is All.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @12:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @12:01PM (#384459)

    I tried to put my data into the cloud, the MS one, Asura, or whatever it's called. A gigantic rhino came out of the cloud and killed my parents. Have been forced to live off of peach ever since. Better to stick with Cray, even with the smoke. At least there are no mirrors, like in the cloud, or rhinos.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @12:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @12:05PM (#384460)

    Cray serves the cloud, as do we all in our own ways.

  • (Score: 2) by julian on Friday August 05 2016, @04:17PM

    by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 05 2016, @04:17PM (#384516)

    I had no idea Cray was still around. Even disregarding the "cloud" snark it's still surprising to me that there's a place for Cray's bespoke supercomputers when you can fill standard racks with COTS server equipment at a fraction of the cost. Even if it's not as powerful or efficient for what you want it must be vastly cheaper than commissioning a one of a kind purpose built system.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SecurityGuy on Friday August 05 2016, @04:51PM

      by SecurityGuy (1453) on Friday August 05 2016, @04:51PM (#384532)

      ...you can fill standard racks with COTS server equipment at a fraction of the cost.

      Apples to oranges. Standard racks full of COTS server equipment don't do HPC, a core component of which is the nodes being able to talk to each other really fast (very low latency and high bandwidth).

      Even if it's not as powerful or efficient for what you want it must be vastly cheaper than commissioning a one of a kind purpose built system.

      HPC systems, including Cray's, aren't one of a kind, purpose built systems, though I can't speak for anything that happens in the classified world. You'd probably be surprised by the cost, too. By the time you design and build your own cluster, full of commodity hardware, commodity switches, scheduler, cluster management, yadda yadda, you may well have spent less on hardware, but you've spent your own time setting it up. When you have a problem, you have to figure out which part isn't working, call up the vendor and hope they don't claim they don't do the finger pointing thing (server support says it's a switch problem, switch people say it's a server problem, etc).

      Buy the whole package from one place, and you get software and hardware that's already verified to work together, tested, and a support structure who will show up on your doorstep in a couple hours if it stops working.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 05 2016, @04:59PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 05 2016, @04:59PM (#384539)

      > Even if it's not as powerful or efficient for what you want

      A few people really want FASTEST, and are ready to pay for it.
      A good example would be High-frequency traders, where low latency is literally worth hundreds of millions, though I don't know if Cray plays in that market.

      Note how TFS mentions that 5 systems is enough to trigger the customer delays...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @06:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @06:22PM (#384582)

        A good example would be High-frequency traders

        Do you have any information to support this claim? (And I'll accept, "I know a guy.") Methinks a book blew this out of proportion some. I can see them hiring FPGA guys and embedded systems guys, but HPC. Maybe for multi-asset-class derivative portfolio management -- and even that usually doesn't need high speed. I am aware of only one company that has proposed Cray-like HPC for trading.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 05 2016, @07:16PM

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 05 2016, @07:16PM (#384598)

          Quoting myself:
          > A good example would be High-frequency traders, where low latency is literally worth hundreds of millions, though I don't know if Cray plays in that market.

          So no, I don't know specifically that Cray arch is useful for HFT. But I was answering
          > surprising to me that there's a place for Cray's bespoke supercomputers when you can fill standard racks with COTS server equipment at a fraction of the cost
          with an example of people who wouldn't make as much cash with COTS as they do with dedicated low-latency systems.
          We're talking about the people who rent a room with a window across from the exchange to setup their gear, because line-of-sight links are faster than an optical fiber running under the street.
          I once interviewed with the guys doing FPGA-based HFT systems. There's a lot of money in non-COTS, because there's a lot to be made.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday August 06 2016, @04:28AM

      by stormwyrm (717) on Saturday August 06 2016, @04:28AM (#384694) Journal

      For some classes of problems nothing else but a bespoke supercomputer will do. If you're doing something like, say, trying to find solutions to a lattice quantum chromodynamics problem, or for a massively high resolution finite element method problem, or trying to use the general number field sieve to factor a 1024 bit RSA key [soylentnews.org] (cough, cough, NSA, cough), a rack of COTS systems simply does not have enough bandwidth and is too high latency to make the problem feasible. For instance the matrix for the the linear reduction of a 1024 bit number using the general number field sieve requires a few terabytes of very low latency memory. Where can you find a COTS system that has anything like that? Sure, if you had a thousand nodes with several gigabytes each they might in aggregate have a few terabytes of RAM, but the latency to access it even using 10 gigE would still be too high to make the problem practical. Supercomputing isn't just about TFLOPS: it is every bit much about very low latency I/O too.

      --
      Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.