Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Acquire Cray for $1.3 Billion
This morning Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray are announcing that HPE will be buying out the supercomputer maker for roughly 1.3 billion dollars. Intending to use Cray's knowledge and technology to bolster their own supercomputing and high-performance computing technologies, when the deal closes, HPE will become the world leader for supercomputing technology.
Cray of course needs no introduction. The current leader in the supercomputing field and founder of supercomputing as we know it, Cray has been a part of the supercomputing landscape since the 1970s. Starting at the time with fully custom systems, in more recent years Cray has morphed into an integrator and scale-out specialist, combining processors from the likes of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA into supercomputers, and applying their own software, I/O, and interconnect technologies.
The timing of the acquisition announcement closely follows other major news from Cray: the company just landed a $600 million US Department of Energy contract to supply the Frontier supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021. Frontier is one of two exascale supercomputers Cray is involved in – the other being a subcontractor for the 2021 Aurora system – and in fact Cray is involved in the only two exascale systems ordered by the US Government thus far. So in both a historical and modern context, Cray was and is one of the biggest players in the supercomputing market.
Related: Intel and Cray Will Build Aurora, U.S.'s First Exaflops Supercomputer, for $500 Million
Cray and AMD Will Build a 1.5 Exaflops Supercomputer by 2021
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Intel will build the first exascale supercomputer in the US
Research planned for the $500 million+ Aurora project includes suicide prevention (by analyzing risk factors) and improving the ability to "predict climate at a regional scale," according to Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne. Researchers also hope to discover materials that will help in the construction of more efficient solar cells and develop "extreme-scale cosmological simulations."
The teams behind the project are not ready to share specific technical specs (including the supercomputer's estimated power consumption). However, Aurora will use an upcoming Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Intel Optane DC memory, the X compute architecture and Intel's ONE API. Cray will also contribute its Shasta supercomputer system, which includes more than 200 cabinets and the Slingshot interconnect.
Also at The Verge and TechCrunch.
See also: Argonne Hints at Future Architecture of Aurora Exascale System
Cray and AMD will build an exascale supercomputer for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
AMD today announced that it will partner with Cray to build Frontier, a supercomputer capable of "exascale" performance — one that can complete at least a quintillion floating point computations ("flops") per second, where a flop equals two 15-digit numbers multiplied together — for weather system simulation, subatomic particle modeling, and more. The two companies expect it will be the world's fastest supercomputer when it's delivered in 2021, with more than 1.5 exaflops of theoretical performance — roughly 50 times the speed of today's top supercomputers and faster than the top 160 combined. Frontier will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
[...] Driving Frontier's breakthrough compute is what AMD claims is the first "fully optimized" GPU and CPU design for supercomputing. It features a custom AMD Epyc processor packing a future Zen core architecture designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads, along with a graphics processing unit (GPU) in AMD's Radeon Instinct product lineup of server accelerators. The GPUs feature HPC engines, "extensive" mixed precision operations, and high-bandwidth memory, and they're linked together — one Epyc processor to four Instinct graphics cards — by AMD's Infinity Fabric and Cray Slingshot high-bandwidth system interconnect architectures.
Also at AnandTech and The Verge.
See also: AMD's Supercomputer Deal Is a 'Landmark Win' for Chip Maker, Analyst Says
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Sunday May 19 2019, @05:52AM
That's cray cray!
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday May 19 2019, @10:13AM
Pish-tosh! I beg to differ [youtube.com]!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19 2019, @11:17AM
So when will HP Support Assistant be ported to run on the Cray platform? And does this mean I'll finally be able to get an InkJet printer driver from my Cray X1E?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19 2019, @02:24PM (2 children)
Whelp, say goodbye to Cray. HPE will suck them dry, fuck them over, and spit out the chewed up remains, just like they do with almost all their acquisitions. Big bonuses for the C-suite, pink slips and fuck-all for everyone else.
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday May 19 2019, @04:09PM (1 child)
What do you mean? Surely this will breathe new life into the Compaq/DEC acquisition.
“When mainframe computers ruled the Earth!”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19 2019, @04:25PM
I hear that they're going to use the Cray platform as the vehicle for Itanium's comeback.
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday May 19 2019, @04:05PM (5 children)
What exactly is “Cray’s technology” and why is it so expensive? Is it something other than CMOS? Don’t tell me it’s just architecture.
Seems like a lot of money for a tech company whose main customer is the US Government.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 19 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)
Because it is liquid-cooled and comes in a wicked-cool looking case with LEDs that pulsate with your sound effects.
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday May 19 2019, @08:10PM
Yes, but does it come in a lucite box with a shiny chrome cylinder in the middle like this IBM machine recently featured on Soylent News:
https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/08/ibm-q-system-one-quantum-computer/ [engadget.com]
Otherwise, just talk to the hand...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @03:04AM
Seymour Cray said his strength was packaging.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 20 2019, @04:15AM
Look at other tech acquisitions. $1.3 billion isn't that much, really.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 20 2019, @04:23AM
> What exactly is “Cray’s technology” ...
It's one thing to have a mountain of CPUs and GPUs; getting them to communicate efficiently is the trick. Cray calls it "Gemini Interconnect" which includes hardware (chips). Used, for example, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_XK7 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19 2019, @07:40PM
Cray got bought out by SGI.
SGI spun it out when it was hard up for money.
Cray keeps on chugging on.
HP buys out Cray.
HP will either kill Cray or kill itself. If it kills itself, Cray will be spun out again for cash, and it will keep on chugging on.
I would bet on Cray surviving longer than HP. And that's sad.