Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

D-Wave Systems announced a partnership with Japanese industrial giant NEC today to build what they call “hybrid apps and services” that work on a combination of NEC high-performance computers and D-Wave’s quantum systems.

The two companies also announced that NEC will be investing $10 million in D-Wave, which has raised $204 million prior to this, according to Crunchbase data.

D-Wave’s chief product officer and EVP of R&D, Alan Baratz, whom the company announced this week will be taking over as CEO effective January 1st, says the company has been able to do a lot of business in Japan, and the size of this deal could help push the technology further. “Our collaboration with global pioneer NEC is a major milestone in the pursuit of fully commercial quantum applications,” he said in a statement.

The company says it is one of the earliest deals between a quantum vendor and a multinational IT company with the size and scale of NEC. The deal involves three key elements. First of all, NEC and D-Wave will come together to develop hybrid services that combine NEC’s supercomputers and other classical systems with D-Wave’s quantum technology. The hope is that by combining the classical and quantum systems, they can create better performance for lower cost than you could get if you tried to do similar computing on a strictly classical system.

The two companies will also work together with NEC customers to build applications that will take advantage of this hybrid approach. Also, NEC will be an authorized reseller of D-Wave cloud services.

For NEC, which claims to have demonstrated the world’s first quantum bit device way back in 1999, it is about finding ways to keep advancing commercial quantum computing. “Quantum computing development is critical for the future of every industry tasked with solving today’s most complex problems. Hybrid applications and greater access to quantum systems is what will allow us to achieve truly commercial-grade quantum solutions,” Motoo Nishihara, executive vice president and CTO at NEC Corporation, said in a statement.

This deal should help move the companies toward that goal.

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.

Rescale, the startup that wants to bring high performance computing to the cloud, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Initialized Capital, Keen Venture Partners and SineWave Ventures.

They join a list of well-known early investors that included Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Peter Thiel and others. Today’s investment brings the total amount raised to $52 million, according to the company.

Rescale works with engineering, aerospace, scientific and other verticals and helps them move their legacy high performance computing applications to the cloud. The idea is to provide a set of high performance computing resources, whether that’s on prem or in the cloud, and help customers tune their applications to get the maximum performance.

Traditionally HPC has taken place on prem in a company’s data center. These companies often have key legacy applications they want to move to the cloud and Rescale can help them do that in the most efficient manner, whether that involves bare metal a virtual machine or a container.

“We help take a portfolio of [legacy] applications running on prem and help enable them in the cloud or in a hybrid environment. We tune and optimize the applications on our platform and take advantage of capital assets on prem, then we help extend that environment to different cloud vendors or tune to best practices for the specific application,” company CEO and co-founder Joris Poort explained.

Photo: Rescale

Ben Verwaayen, who is a partner at one of the lead investors, Keen Venture Partners, sees a company going after a large legacy market with a new approach. “The market is currently 95% on-premise, and Rescale supports customers as they move to hybrid and eventually to a fully cloud native solution. Rescale helps CIOs enable the digital transformation journey within their enterprise, to optimize IT resources and enable meaningful productivity and cost improvements,” Verwaayen said in a statement.

The new influx of cash should help Rescale, well, scale, and that will involve hiring more developers, solutions architects and the like. The company wants to also use the money to expand its presence in Asia and Europe and establish relationships with systems integrators, who would be a good fit for a product like this and help expand their market beyond what they can do as a young startup.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2011 and has 80 employees. They currently have 150 customers including Sikorsky Innovation, Boom Aerospace and Trek Bikes.

Nvidia launched a monster box yesterday called the HGX-2, and it’s the stuff that geek dreams are made of. It’s a cloud server that is purported to be so powerful it combines high performance computing with artificial intelligence requirements in one exceptionally compelling package.

You know you want to know the specs, so let’s get to it: It starts with 16x NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. That’s good for 2 petaFLOPS for AI with low precision, 250 teraFLOPS
for medium precision and 125 teraFLOPS for those times when you need the highest precision. It comes standard with a 1/2 a terabyte of memory and 12 Nvidia NVSwitches, which enable GPU to GPU communications at 300 GB per second. They have doubled the capacity from the HGX-1 released last year.

Chart: Nvidia

Paresh Kharya, group product marketing manager for Nvidia’s Tesla data center products says this communication speed enables them to treat the GPUs essentially as a one giant, single GPU. “And what that allows [developers] to do is not just access that massive compute power, but also access that half a terabyte of GPU memory as a single memory block in their programs,” he explained.

Graphic: Nvidia

Unfortunately you won’t be able to buy one of these boxes. In fact, Nvidia is distributing them strictly to resellers, who will likely package these babies up and sell them to hyperscale datacenters and cloud providers. The beauty of this approach for cloud resellers is that when they buy it, they have the entire range of precision in a single box, Kharya said

“The benefit of the unified platform is as companies and cloud providers are building out their infrastructure, they can standardize on a single unified architecture that supports the entire range of high performance workloads. So whether it’s AI, or whether it’s high performance simulations the entire range of workloads is now possible in just a single platform,”Kharya explained.

He points out this is particularly important in large scale datacenters. “In hyperscale companies or cloud providers, the main benefit that they’re providing is the economies of scale. If they can standardize on the fewest possible architectures, they can really maximize the operational efficiency. And what HGX allows them to do is to standardize on that single unified platform,” he added.

As for developers, they can write programs that take advantage of the underlying technologies and program in the exact level of precision they require from a single box.

The HGX-2 powered servers will be available later this year from partner resellers including Lenovo, QCT, Supermicro and Wiwynn.

 AWS attempted to enhance its high performance computing offering today when it purchased NICE, an Italian software and services company for an undisclosed price.
NICE provides a set of tools and technologies that were attractive to AWS, and brings with it an international clientele, which should help AWS expand its market with a set of customers who have high-end compute… Read More

 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