[Info-vax] HPE buys Cray

[Kerry Main]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Info-vax <info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com> On Behalf Of Grant Taylor
> via Info-vax
> Sent: May 18, 2019 2:30 PM
> To: info-vax at rbnsn.com
> Cc: Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net>
> Subject: Re: [Info-vax] HPE buys Cray
> 
> 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.
> 

HPE has now bought SGI and Cray.

Nvidia just purchased Mellanox for all of its high performance interconnect technologies.

See recent high performance collaboration between HPE and Nvidia: (deep learning and AI)
<https://www.hpe.com/ca/en/solutions/hpc-high-performance-computing/nvidia-collaboration.html>

Based on above, any bets that HPE will next buy (or "merge") with Nvidia?

😊


Regards,

Kerry Main
Kerry dot main at starkgaming dot com