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