Aug
22
2019
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NASA’s new HPE-built supercomputer will prepare for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon

NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have teamed up to build a new supercomputer, which will serve NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and develop models and simulations of the landing process for Artemis Moon missions.

The new supercomputer is called “Aitken,” named after American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken, and it can run simulations at up to 3.69 petaFLOPs of theoretical performance power. Aitken is custom-designed by HPE and NASA to work with the Ames modular data center, which is a project it undertook starting in 2017 to massively reduce the amount of water and energy used in cooling its supercomputing hardware.

Aitken employs second-generation Intel Xeon processors, Mellanox InfiniBand high-speed networking, and has 221 TB of memory on board for storage. It’s the result of four years of collaboration between NASA and HPE, and it will model different methods of entry, descent and landing for Moon-destined Artemis spacecraft, running simulations to determine possible outcomes and help determine the best, safest approach.

This isn’t the only collaboration between HPE and NASA: The enterprise computer maker built for the agency a new kind of supercomputer able to withstand the rigors of space, and sent it up to the ISS in 2017 for preparatory testing ahead of potential use on longer missions, including Mars. The two partners then opened that supercomputer for use in third-party experiments last year.

HPE also announced earlier this year that it was buying supercomputer company Cray for $1.3 billion. Cray is another long-time partner of NASA’s supercomputing efforts, dating back to the space agency’s establishment of a dedicated computational modeling division and the establishing of its Central Computing Facility at Ames Research Center.

May
17
2019
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HPE is buying Cray for $1.3 billion

HPE announced it was buying Cray for $1.3 billion, giving it access to the company’s high-performance computing portfolio, and perhaps a foothold into quantum computing in the future.

The purchase price was $35 a share, a $5.19 premium over yesterday’s close of $29.81 a share. Cray was founded in the 1970s and for a time represented the cutting edge of super computing in the United States, but times have changed, and as the market has shifted, a deal like this makes sense.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says this is about consolidation at the high end of the market. “This is a smart acquisition for HPE. Cray has been losing money for some time but had a great portfolio of IP and patents that is key for the quantum era,” he told TechCrunch.

While HPE’s president and CEO Antonio Neri didn’t see it in those terms, he did see an opportunity in combining the two organizations. “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,” he said in a statement.

Cray CEO and president Peter Ungaro agreed. “We believe that the combination of Cray and HPE creates an industry leader in the fast-growing High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI markets and creates a number of opportunities that neither company would likely be able to capture on their own,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy says HPC is one of the fastest growing markets and HPE has indicated it wants to stake a claim there. “I’m not surprised by the deal. Its degree of success will be determined by the integration of the two companies. HPE brings increased scale and some unique consumption models and Cray brings expertise and unique connectivity IP,” Moorhead explained.

While it’s not clear how this will work over time, this type of consolidation usually involves some job loss on the operations side of the house as the two companies become one. It is also unclear how this will affect Cray’s customers as it moves to become part of HPE, but HPE has plans to create a high-performance computing product family using its new assets in combination with the new Cray products.

HPE was formed when HP split into two companies in 2014. HP Inc. is the printer division, while HPE is the enterprise side.

The deal is subject to the typical regulatory oversight, but if all goes well, it is expected to close in HPE’s fiscal Q1 2020.

May
23
2016
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Cray’s latest supercomputer runs OpenStack and open source big data tools

Cray Urika-GX super computer Cray has always been associated with speed and power and its latest computing beast called the Cray Urika-GX system has been designed specifically for big data workloads. What’s more, it runs on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform and supports open source big data processing tools like Hadoop and Spark. Cray recognizes that the computing world had evolved since Seymour Cray… Read More

Aug
25
2014
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Geek Dreams: Cray CS-Storm Delivers High-Performance Computing In Million-Dollar Package

Cray CS-Storm - Open view of super computer hardware. Imagine a system with 22 x 2u servers in a 48u rack -all cranking on 176 NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU chips providing an astonishing 250 Teraflops per rack. We’re talking scream machines and that’s what Cray is delivering in its latest high-performance system called the Cray CS-Storm. Consider that a four cabinet Cray CS-Storm system is capable of delivering more than one petaflop of… Read More

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