Hewlett Packard Enterprise Has Bought Cray and Will Push to ExaFLOP Supercomputers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has bought Cray Supercomputers.

Cray Research was started in 1972 by the legendary supercomputer expert Seymour Cray.

HPE and Cray want to lead in the Exascale era. The promise of Exascale is more than a single gigantic supercomputer or a performance milestone. It is the ability to take advantage of the explosion of disparate data with increasingly complex modeling, simulation, analytics and artificial intelligence to drive new discovery, innovation and insights. This combination of data and compute-intensive workloads operating at extreme scale, and often in real-time, exceeds the capabilities of today’s datacenter infrastructure. Exascale computing systems and technologies will allow scientists and engineers to overcome these barriers and produce the world’s next breakthroughs.

Cray began developing our Shasta supercomputer and Slingshot interconnect several years ago. The Shasta supercomputing architecture is an entirely new design, built from the ground up to address the needs of the Exascale era. It enables a diversity of processor technologies, supports converged, heterogeneous workloads, eliminates the distinction between supercomputers and clusters, and fuses the performance and scale of a supercomputer with the productivity of the cloud. Slingshot is different than any interconnect Cray, or anyone else, has ever built. In addition to high speed and low latency, Slingshot incorporates intelligent features that enable diverse workloads to run simultaneously across the system. It includes novel adaptive routing, quality-of-service and congestion management capabilities while providing full Ethernet compatibility. Shasta and Slingshot are the basis of three recent seminal wins at the U.S. Department of Energy, powering a pre-Exascale supercomputer as well as the first two Exascale systems in the United States. Shasta hasn’t even started shipping yet and is quickly approaching $1 billion in new wins.

SOURCES- Cray, HPE
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

12 thoughts on “Hewlett Packard Enterprise Has Bought Cray and Will Push to ExaFLOP Supercomputers”

  1. My family was an early investor in Seymour’s first company (other than CDC). Having worked at HP circa 2000, and being familiar with the “Supercomputer” industry I’m betting against US leadership in so-called “ExaFLOP Supercomputers” if this takeover is representative of the best the US has to offer. It is very much like the conflict between the architectures within CDC that led to Cray’s departure. Anyone can design an “ExaFLOP Supercomputer” if you throw enough chips at it. However, passing a reasonable range of useful benchmarks is another matter.

  2. Most of what you mention can be done with a decent workstation. What are people actually doing with the big supercomputers?

  3. that’s personalized advertising, you’re the only one seeing it because after reading your cookies (and secretely checking your browser settings against a database of browser settings related to certain users who may or may not have cookies) the ad server knows you may be into that.

  4. Reese Witherspoon and Oprah ad in an HPC-related article… whatever pays the bills I guess. 🙂

  5. Pretty much everybody who is anybody in HPC is playing together with Shasta so exactly the same components in Frontier will be used in Shasta.

  6. The Department of Energy, which is a major customer for these super-computers, also manages the US supply of nuclear weapons. They use these computers to simulate the decay of the various radioactive materials within nuclear bombs, and predict what minor adjustments are needed for the weapons to explode correctly. Without these computers, the DoE would have to regularly take nukes out of the stockpile and detonate them, which needless to say gets expensive & messy rather quickly.

  7. Weather is of course just fluid flow and energy balances… but on a smaller scale that’s combustion in an engine… chemical reactors, power plant boilers. Improve any of those by 5% and you make a real difference
    detailed chemical reaction models are even better… everything from better oil refining to drug production. Push it further and there is hope of modelling… even predicting, drug interactions with biology.
    Weather is a tiny application,…though maybe one that journalists can understand so they keep mentioning it.

Comments are closed.