[Info-vax] HPE buys Cray

[Scott Dorsey]

Kerry Main  <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> wrote:
>Well, Cray must still have some smarts and/or value add left.
>
>>From the earlier thread on May 17/19 announcing HPE takeover of Cray:
>
>"Cray is one of the leading players in supercomputing, with its systems
>powering three of the world's top 10 supercomputers. The company just
>recently announced an Exascale supercomputer contract for more than $600
>million for the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
>Cray's architecture and interconnect technology are also part of a $500
>million, 1 exaFlop supercomputer called Aurora set to arrive in 2021 at
>Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago."

Cray makes money on support.  The Cray systems are big clusters made of
commodity x86 systems with Cray's proprietary interconnect.  The interconnect
really -is- very good and has some advantages over infiniband and ethernet.

But, if you buy a Cray machine, you have to run Cray's proprietary version
of Linux, because it's the only thing that supports their interconnect.
Which means now you're paying for their operating system and long term
support for their OS.

We looked at getting a used cluster from some of the DoE people actually,
and compared it with comparable commodity hardware with Mellanox boards and
CentOS as we are currently running.  The support was high enough that we
could have basically bought a new equivalent commodity machine every two 
years for the cost of the Cray support.

For a long time, what kept Cray alive was their interconnect technology
and their compiler.  Now that SGI/Rackable/HPE owns the compiler, all they
have left is the interconnect technology and the name.  The interconnect
is good but it's not worth the money.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."