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Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray
- azinman2 7y agoEnd of an era. Long live Cray!
- dkersten 7y agoI would say the Cray era ended in 1996 when Cray merged with SGI (and with a the founders death)
- moonbug 7y agoIronically, HPE bought SGI a couple of years ago.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y agoThey also bought Compaq which had bought DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), of PDP and VAX fame. To complete the set, they should have bought Sun, instead of letting Oracle do that. (Seems they were busy blowing the billions on a software acquisition now resulting in jail sentences.)
- zantana 7y agoIt's funny how some companies just seem to acquire old giants/pioneers as some sort of trophy case to the point where they have the DNA of most of the industry, but frequently little of the talent. I think of companies like Chrysler who through AMC acquired pretty much all of the extinct mid-century American car companies and now has branched all over the globe. How much of that old history is even tracable. Also Computer Associates, wherever they are now.
- culturestate 7y ago> Also Computer Associates, wherever they are now. Broadcom bought CA last fall - https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/financial-releases/2375294 https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/financial-releases/237...
- basch 7y agoand then was sold in 2000
- ckastner 7y agoOne of my favorite quotes [1]: "I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray." -- Comment [by Seymour Cray] on Apple's purchase of a Cray which was intended to help them design the next Mac. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Seymour_Cray https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Seymour_Cray
- saagarjha 7y agoAnother gem from that page: > Parity is for farmers. > > On why he left memory error-detecting code out of the CDC 6600. > I learned that a lot of farmers buy computers. > > After he did include error-detecting code on the CDC 7600
- yellowapple 7y agoMy favorite: > If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
- gbrown_ 7y agoCurious timing if this is legit. Cray just announced a large deal for ORNL [1]. Share prices jumped up around ~$3. That being said maybe it's better PR to have such a deal announced with Cray than "Cray who have recently been acquired by..."? [1] https://www.ornl.gov/news/us-department-energy-and-cray-deliver-record-setting-frontier-supercomputer-ornl https://www.ornl.gov/news/us-department-energy-and-cray-deli...
- astrodust 7y agoSlowly collecting all the big supercomputer companies. SGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International) was an HP acquisition in 2016.
- munk-a 7y agoYea... except HP is where things go to die. They have a long proud history of acquiring a company and investing some money in it - then deciding it's too expensive, shutting down the department and fire-selling any hardware they have in stock.
- milesward 7y agoI stand ready to buy Cray hardware at firesale prices with exceptional glee
- Analemma_ 7y agoI could finally play Crysis!
- tmountain 7y agoMight run into chipset compatibility issues...
- jacquesm 7y agoAnd a rather exorbitant power bill, assuming you had enough current in the first place.
- beezischillin 7y agoConsidering how Crysis’ biggest issue on modern hardware is that it doesn’t scale to multi-core, I doubt cramming it onto many more cores would help it, even if it ran
- W-Stool 7y agoNot their first - they bought Convex way back in the day.
- gonzo 7y ago1995
- bryanlarsen 7y agoI hope they take the Cray name so we can stop confusing HP Inc (PC's and printers) with HPE (supercomputers, storage, networking etc)
- zwieback 7y agoYes! I work for HPI and this is a good idea.
- ClassyJacket 7y agoMaybe HP is just like Microsoft - terrible at naming things. How many names has TRIM had over the years?
- subway 7y agoHP isn't one company. They are two completely separate companies that share part of their name.
- mpa000 7y agoBoth come from the Compaq/HP chimera that absorbed DEC's name. The apple doesn't fall far from the other apple from the same tree.
- jankeymeulen 7y agoHP, Compaq and EDS.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoMost of what HP got from DEC went into HPE. And the old HP offices in Cupertino are now Apple's new spaceship campus. Those were dark days.
- basch 7y agoHPE bought Cray, not HP And this isnt really the original Cray. Its someone who bought Cray and started using their name (although they kept the original location open.) So there is precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tera_Computer_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tera_Computer_Company
- boulos 7y agoNow official with a primary source: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2019/05/hpe-to-acquire-supercomputing-leader-cray.html https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2019/05/hpe...
- C1sc0cat 7y agoOh well that's Cray Runined
- godzillabrennus 7y agoHopefully the team gets a good exit out of the deal before HP destroys the products.
- neilv 7y agoHP was once considered one of the best places to work, and known for innovation and making some of the best products. I understand that HP executives had a belief in management by walking around, and talking to the people on the ground. I think it was around the time of Fiorina that this changed. There were mergers/acquisitions, changes in management style, and changes in industry. Today, I still see signs of greatness in some HP products, though I can't forget seeing their brand on corner-cutting consumer PCs, and the playing of games with inkjet consumables is bad for brand goodwill. I don't know how HPE fits into that history, but I suspect that their market demands they perform well. I hope HPE keeps the Cray name for at least some purposes, and honors the name with great work befitting it. There's also the great name of HP to honor. (Story: As a nerdy teen, I once got to go to a Cray division (Cray Research Superservers), to port some software. I'd grown up reading about Cray supercomputers, seeing them on the top supercomputers list, etc., Cray had both technical innovation and style, and there was a huge mystique around them. On-site, typing on a workstation frontend, telneted into a big cabinet across the room that would say Cray on it if the panels were on, was an experience I couldn't process, because I was half-terrified into accomplishing the mission (it turned out to be easy), but there was much gushing in awe to coworkers afterwards.)
- dman 7y agoCan you point to some HP products that are still great? As a student of computing history this is interesting to me.
- neilv 7y agoThe one in my field of view right now is an HP LaserJet Pro 400 series. My previous LaserJet, a 5N, I found set out for the trash on the curb late one night, in a sprinkling of rain. So I hauled it home, plugged it in, and proceeded to run it for over a decade, very infrequently putting new toner in it (never even had to replace the rollers). Eventually, the LaserJet 5N's fan started to fail (all the mechanics and fuser and everything still working fine), which presumably was a replaceable muffin fan, but I also wanted a sleep mode (and preferably to not dim the lights at warmup), so I parted it out (too heavy to ship, but the parts were still marketable), and bought a contemporary LaserJet. The new LaserJet is not as bulletproof-looking, but is sturdy and has worked like a champ for a few years, for letter and envelopes, and it still respects the toner. My only complaints are that I wish they wouldn't play setup convenience tricks with USB, and that I'm unwilling to give its huge firmware direct network access. (For CUPS drivers, instead of using `hplip`, I now use the simpler "HP LaserJet Series PCL 6 CUPS".)
- bytematic 7y agoBetter serve Linies still!
- compuguy 7y agoDuplicate article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936562
- jmpman 7y agoHow does IB compare to Cray’s new interconnect? All supercomputing nodes these days appear to be water cooled, high density servers with a number of Nvidia GPUs connected to a low latency interconnect fabric, along with a Lustre/GPFS storage cluster. The interconnect fabric used to be the secret sauce, and IB has commoditized it. Why buy Cray?
- baybal2 7y ago"Why buy Accenture?" I feel, it is the same type "aspirational" acquisition
- zamadatix 7y agoLikely it's mostly just a customer base grab. I will say there is more to an interconnect than "is the hardware commodity or not" though, you have to be able to show you are able to come up with ways to use it more efficiently than competitor designs.
- aetimmes 7y agoCray just won a $600M bid for Oak Ridge National Labs' new exaflop HPC cluster using AMD Epyc/Radeon. Most IB cards come from Intel and Mellanox (recently purchased by NVidia). IB is a commodity, sure, but it's becoming increasingly tied into the Intel/NVidia ecosystem, and having the ability to go with another interconnect/processor architecture is a powerful strategic advantage.
- gnufx 7y agoAs far as I know, Intel no longer does the IB-compatiable Truscale, or whatever it was called finally. It's OPA now.
- pinewurst 7y agoIt’s funny then that Omni-Path originated with Intel’s purchase of the Cray interconnect team back in 2012. https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-acquires-industry-leading-high-performance-computing-interconnect-technology-and-expertise/#gs.cmt9dr https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-acquires-indu...
- aetimmes 7y agoUgh, does this mean that Cray support is going to go through Unisys now?
- joshmn 7y agoMy father — who ended up at Unisys after HPE moved away from support (and was previously with Compaq via the Digital acquisition) — says it's unlikely, at least to start.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThey do realize that this same action finally pulled SGI under the surface of the water to drown, right? It would be super awesome if there was a company that had a workable business model where it could successfully do "very large compute system" research and development. Given the way they handled "The Machine" though, suggests to me that this is not that company.
- pinewurst 7y agoIf one looks into Cray's viability as a business, you'll see a pretty much unending string of losses. Though the CEO is the best paid (or pretty darned close) in Seattle, at least on a cash basis. As HPE is close to the #1 HPC vendor anyway, all they're going to get is entree to some of the more esoteric government contracts - which they'll probably wreck by trying to cram their awful consulting services into.
- noobermin 7y agoPerhaps they don't care. They want to cash out and abandon ship like all good managers/CEOs/founders do.
- jngreenlee 7y ago>Given the way they handled "The Machine" though Tell me more...I'm an HPE fan, and live near Ft Collins, get to tour the lab sometimes. I see progress being made but maybe its not in a very public way. Biggest thing I could add is that the 'Machine' is not a reference architecture or target...its a pipeline of research that (by visual accounts) is continuing...
- billyhoffman 7y agoWell, here is how they announced “The Machine” back in 2014: This changes everything,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in introducing the Machine in her HP Discover 2014 keynote in Las Vegas. “We’ve been talking about many of the component technologies for some time,” she noted. “Now we’re bringing them together in a single project to make a revolutionary compute architecture available by the end of the decade.” Since then, not a lot. HP Labs has done a lot of sexy things, but HPE as a business is big on hype, bad on delivery. Hopefully Cray won’t be the same
- davidmr 7y agoThis genuinely surprised me, but I’m less sure than everyone else that this spells the end of Cray. They’re still cranking out monster systems: they have 3 in the top 10 now (and almost certainly more than that since the DoD stopped listing their systems). As everyone has noted, they also signed contracts for new monsters at Argonne and Oak Ridge, which will likely debut at #2 and #1 respectively. I think it’s very unlikely that the US government lets them go out of business after HPE closes the sale. They’re the best competitor to IBM, and the DoE and DoD are always careful to spread their procurements around to keep more than one company capable of supplying the big defense/weapons supers. This is just totally a guess from having worked in HPC for so long, but I’d be very surprised if this purchase didn’t include some sort of back channel wink and nod by the feds at a promise by HPE to keep building the big computers. I’ll miss them though. While their systems weren’t always the best, when you got your problems escalated to their R&D group, you got to work with some cool people. I imagine those people will get sucked into HPE and/or get fed up and defect to Intel pretty quickly.
- logicallee 7y agoDoes Cray manufacture their own silicon? I did glance through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray including reading the lead, and did the same Google search... while I'm sure I could dig deeper, maybe it's fun to let people here say what they know :)
- BooneJS 7y agoThey’re fabless.
- logicallee 7y agoso what's the story? how do they compete?
- AdrianB1 7y agoThey have the expertise, not the fabs. They know how to build and interconnect CPU's and memory to a huge scale that others are struggling with.
- noobermin 7y agoI work in computational science. Not sure how I feel about this. HP has not had a great track record as of late and I don't know what this means for continuing support of Cray systems already in use.
- pmiller2 7y agoThis was my reaction, too: "great, another thing for HP to ruin."
- tombert 7y agoI honestly didn't realize that Cray was still around. My dad has told me that when he was in grad school, the Cray was the coolest machine out there, and it felt kind of like magic to him. Do they still do hyper-efficient vector machines?
- BooneJS 7y agoNot since Black Widow. It’s only been custom hardware interconnects since 2008 or so.
- marmshallow 7y agoDumb question, but what defines a supercomputer? I would say EC2 is a supercomputer too, which is effectively computing The Internet live.
- xtreme 7y agoThe definition of a supercomputer has changed over the years, but currently what defines a supercomputer is its interconnect. Most of them have InfiniBand or similar with <1us node-to-node latency. It's necessary for the type of workloads typically run on supercomputers, e.g. scientific applications. The fastest you can get on EC2 right now is ~15us, and that requires specialized hardware and software.
- CodeWriter23 7y agoBack in the day, Geoffrey Fox defined a Supercomputer as a compute system that costs $20M or more. I think that definition still holds to some extent.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoWow!
- closeparen 7y agoWhat is it like to program for a supercomputer? Where can I learn about it? Not having an academic affiliation, is there anywhere I can run small jobs affordably?
- javierluraschi 7y agoProgramming a supercomputer feel like having to write a program that uses thousands of computers, that’s about it. Some supercomputer vendors have specialized software running, but others also support open source distributed computing frameworks like Apache Spark. If you are wondering why we call them supercomputers, it’s because it’s not as easy to just buy thousands of computers. Even easy things like shipping, installation and power consumption becomes a problem on its own. So rather than buying thousands of machines it pays off to buy them through a supercomputer vendor that will optimize space, power consumption, install cluster management software, etc. So if you want to get started, I would just get a small n-node cluster from any cloud provider and get better at writing distributed code.
- closeparen 7y agoI deploy to hundreds of machines at work, but that is just load balanced RPC and message queue processing workloads, interacting with other load balanced RPC and message queue workloads. The little information I can make sense of about “HPC” does not seem familiar through that lens.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoBased on a very shallow reading of Infiniband, I think some of the interconnects of supercomputers are essentially DMA-based rather than network-based. So it's like writing something massively multithreaded (your barrier is one step above shared memory) versus multihosted. I could be completely 100% wrong.
- shaklee3 7y agoMostly learn how to use MPI.
- pcvarmint 7y agoThis is almost certainly due to the DoE Frontier contract awarded to Cray and AMD. [0] HPE is "riding the wave" of this major contract. Cray did something similar with Appro when Appro won a large government supercomputer cluster contract. [1] When the contract was over, former Appro staff at Cray attrited. Once the Frontier project is finished, there's no telling what HPE will do with Cray. Seymour, Bill and Dave must be rolling in their graves. [2] The Seattle office of Cray, which houses executives, HR, and some Chapel/MPI folks, will probably be closed at some point. The Mall of America and Chippewa Falls Cray offices will probably stay open for some time. (Full Disclosure: I worked at HP (1995-2002), Cray (2012-2015), and currently work at AMD.) [0] https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/ https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/ [1] http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsarticle&ID=1756786 http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsa... [2] http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/craytalk/sld001.htm http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/craytalk/sld001.htm
- hn23 7y agoRIP Cray