[Info-vax] HPE buys Cray

[Grant Taylor]

On 5/18/19 9:06 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> The Cray systems are big clusters made of commodity x86 systems with 
> Cray's proprietary interconnect.

I agree that they use commodity components.  But I don't agree that they 
are commodity x86 systems.

I have a colleague that worked for Cray about 3 years ago.  Everything 
he has described about the contemporary Cray systems that he 
administered were decidedly not commodity x86 systems like we can go buy.

Much the same way that Itanium systems are not commodity.  They may use 
many commodity Lego bricks to build them, but the are put together in a 
decidedly not commodity way.

> The interconnect really -is- very good and has some advantages over 
> infiniband and ethernet.

It's my understanding that Cray still has rights to use said 
interconnect technology despite having sold it to (I think) Intel.

> 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.

My understanding is that it's based on (Open?) SuSE with a few 
additions.  Probably drivers for their interconnect.  But other than 
that, it's largely (Open) SuSE.

Their package management system is purportedly considerably worse than YAST.

> 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.

That doesn't surprise me.

> 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.

They don't even have the interconnect technology that they sold off. 
But I think they are working on something new.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die