Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray

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

yellowapple2• 7 years ago

My favorite:

If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

gbrown_• 7 years ago

Curious 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-deli...

astrodust6• 7 years ago

Slowly collecting all the big supercomputer companies. SGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International) was an HP acquisition in 2016.

munk-a• 7 years ago

Yea... 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• 7 years ago

I stand ready to buy Cray hardware at firesale prices with exceptional glee

zwieback3• 7 years ago

Notable exception: Compaq

PorterDuff• 7 years ago

I wonder when that all started? With Apollo maybe?

A friend of mine was working in Colorado and involved in that whole deal, it did't sound super pretty.

soganess• 7 years ago

I have a feeling this has something to do with HPE's memputer. Perhaps it's hitting a few road blocks and they are looking for talent to solve them.

bryanlarsen2• 7 years ago

Are there any left? Will/should this run into anti-trust concerns?

ynnn3• 7 years ago

IBM.

astrodust6• 7 years ago

Oracle's server division (Sun) could get sold off, theoretically speaking.

spitfire• 7 years ago

Don't forget Tandem! The original distributed/nonstop database (in 1981 no less). And the originators of the 5-minute paper.

HPE truly is where greatness goes to die.

https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf

astrodust6• 7 years ago

True, they also absorbed DEC and Compaq ages ago.

z0d• 7 years ago

No one remembers Palm here ? That WebOS was a fantastic OS and Apple iOS / Google copied it's gestures unceremoniously and think they innovated while still not able to perfect it like Palm.

WebOS tablet, HP touchpad 10 got Android custom ROMs and still thriving. Its a shame that had to die.

Android Pie on HP Touchpad - https://www.xda-developers.com/hp-touchpad-android-pie-custo...?

Now WebOS lives in LG Smart TV platform. A big shame, this made me remember Tizen (Samsung WatchOS) which was reanimated from MeeGo which was made from MaeMo.

W-Stool• 7 years ago

Not their first - they bought Convex way back in the day.

gonzo• 7 years ago

1995

bryanlarsen2• 7 years ago

I hope they take the Cray name so we can stop confusing HP Inc (PC's and printers) with HPE (supercomputers, storage, networking etc)

zwieback3• 7 years ago

Yes! I work for HPI and this is a good idea.

ClassyJacket• 7 years ago

Maybe HP is just like Microsoft - terrible at naming things. How many names has TRIM had over the years?

subway6• 7 years ago

HP isn't one company. They are two completely separate companies that share part of their name.

basch3• 7 years ago

HPE 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

microtherion• 7 years ago

Looking forward to the ad campaign: "HP is completely Cray now!"

NotSammyHagar2• 7 years ago

We are cray cray would be even better.

TallGuyShort2• 7 years ago

Or Hewlett Packard-Cray, so they can literally be synonymous and homonymous with "HPC".

Frost1x2• 7 years ago

This is pretty sinister, let's hope HP's marketing doesn't become aware of this.

ddebernardy• 7 years ago

That would run into trademark problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_HPC_Server_2008

outworlder• 7 years ago

To be fair, one company was supposed to be called HP Inc, and the other one was supposed to be called Hewlett Packard Enterprise. These are the official names.

But people love short names.

vram222• 7 years ago

one company was supposed to be called HP Inc

Easy mnemonic: HP Ink. See bryanlarsen comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19940867

siffland• 7 years ago

Oh, you forgot their software spinoff Micro Focus. 20 years of saying HP <softwarename>, everyone in meetings correct me with Micro Focus....old habits die hard.

I just hope it is not like other companies they bought, rebranded and just sort of update them a little but no real innovation (software mostly i mean).

boulos• 7 years ago

Now official with a primary source: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2019/05/hpe...

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

Oh well that's Cray Runined

godzillabrennus• 7 years ago

Hopefully the team gets a good exit out of the deal before HP destroys the products.

neilv3• 7 years ago

HP 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• 7 years ago

Can you point to some HP products that are still great? As a student of computing history this is interesting to me.

throwaway13000• 7 years ago

All currently big companies were once great places to work in. The constant need to grow to satisfy wallstreet (or their own Ego), makes them do shitty things like play games with Iknjet consumables.

Its just the way capitalism works.

ken• 7 years ago

The "HP" that was widely considered a great place to work hasn't existed in a long time. They spun off their original field (test & measurement) as Agilent, who then spun it off as Keysight. The two companies that kept the "HP" in their name have pretty much nothing else in common with the once-great company.

The HP(E) that's buying Cray is not the same organization that gave us LEDs, atomic clocks, scientific calculators, inkjet and laser printers, and the RISC CPUs. That HP is gone.

coredog64• 7 years ago

As much as people like to hate on Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd had positive things to say about the changes she made. He gave her a lot of credit for laying the groundwork for things that eventually worked out.

bytematic• 7 years ago

Better serve Linies still!

compuguy• 7 years ago

Duplicate article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936562

jmpman• 7 years ago

How 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• 7 years ago

"Why buy Accenture?"

I feel, it is the same type "aspirational" acquisition

zamadatix• 7 years ago

Likely 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.

aetimmes2• 7 years ago

Cray 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.

gnufx2• 7 years ago

As far as I know, Intel no longer does the IB-compatiable Truscale, or whatever it was called finally. It's OPA now.

pinewurst2• 7 years ago

It’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-indu...

jabl5• 7 years ago

You're correct in that, from the HW side, the "crown jewels" of Cray is the network ASIC's. Everything else is pretty much commodity.

AFAICS, the main difference between the latest Cray network (slinghshot) and IB are:

- Adaptive non-minimal routing, needed to get good performance on their more scalable network topology. IB has basically static ECMP, which works good for fat trees, which scales as O(log N). But for really large machines topologies like Dragonfly which Cray is using become interesting.

- QoS features to isolate jobs from each other.

- Some kind of compatibility with Ethernet. Not sure exactly how this works, but apparently when the NIC communicates with other compute nodes in the cluster it can use the high-performance mode, but if it communicates with some other system, such as Lustre servers, or management systems, or maybe even, say, pulling a container image from an external system, it looks and behaves like an ethernet NIC with the normal Linux TCP/IP stack running on top.

gnufx2• 7 years ago

I don't think that "all" is true, and I'm not sure what "commoditized" means for IB more than any other HPC interconnect. They're all single-vendor as far as I know (as I don't think you can just buy Oracle IB): IB, OPA, Aries (and Slingshot), TOFU, BXI, and maybe others -- I don't know what the Chinese ones actually are.

mappu• 7 years ago

Gen-Z interconnect is multi-vendor (including Cray and HPE).

There was a talk about it at LCA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSCvkU0UKIU

aetimmes2• 7 years ago

Ugh, does this mean that Cray support is going to go through Unisys now?

joshmn• 7 years ago

My 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• 7 years ago

They 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.

pinewurst2• 7 years ago

If 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.

noobermin3• 7 years ago

Perhaps they don't care. They want to cash out and abandon ship like all good managers/CEOs/founders do.

jngreenlee• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Well, 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

TheCondor• 7 years ago

That was not at all clear from their public messaging. the Machine may very well be a concept but it was messages like a revolutionary product

cmiles74• 7 years ago

I disagree. They announced it as a revelutionary computing system that would change they way all computers would be built. They then chipped away at features until there was litle interesting left... I followed these stories with real interest and was left disappointed.

2014: https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/11/hp-the-machine/

2016: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/hpe-machine-prototyp...

Last Year: https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/06/21/hpe-boots-up-sandbox...

davidmr• 7 years ago

This 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.

logicallee4• 7 years ago

Does Cray manufacture their own silicon? I did glance through 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 :)

BooneJS6• 7 years ago

They’re fabless.

johnklos• 7 years ago

Look at HP's history. They killed the Alpha when the Alpha was the top processor of its time. Even after the decision to kill the Alpha, the sheer momentum of it led to many Top 500 supercomputers such as ASCI Q.

Why did they kill Alpha? Because of a deal with Intel. HP hasn't made money off of shipping Itanic systems. Compared with where they'd be if they never killed Alpha, they've probably lost billions of dollars.

But financially motivated manipulations are more common than drama in a Korean soap. So will HP do the same thing with Cray? We don't know. They could have some back end dealings with Intel again and we could see inferior Intel-based systems instead of AMD-based. It's easily within the realm of possibility.

sitkack• 7 years ago

You make it out like HP is some sorta hit-company for hire. At least they still have printers and test and measurement equipment.

tannhaeuser• 7 years ago

Alpha is a painful loss for sure, and the end result for Itanic makes HP look bad. But I guess they were looking at the figures to stay at the top with respect to manufacturing costs going forward at the time, which is just brutal when competing with chips produced in much larger quantities such as x86. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here which Alpha had no chance of recouping, ever. IBM/Power has/had similar challenges.

noobermin3• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

This was my reaction, too: "great, another thing for HP to ruin."

tombert• 7 years ago

I 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?

BooneJS6• 7 years ago

Not since Black Widow. It’s only been custom hardware interconnects since 2008 or so.

marmshallow• 7 years ago

Dumb question, but what defines a supercomputer? I would say EC2 is a supercomputer too, which is effectively computing The Internet live.

xtreme• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

Back 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• 7 years ago

Wow!

closeparen2• 7 years ago

What 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• 7 years ago

Programming 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.

closeparen2• 7 years ago

I 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.

shaklee3• 7 years ago

Mostly learn how to use MPI.

jabl5• 7 years ago

MPI is by far the dominant method for communicating among nodes. So learn that. MPI works fine on a multicore machine as well (launch one MPI rank per core), so you can run on your own machine, no need to use the cloud or anything like that.

For using GPU's, there's CUDA, or offloading with OpenMP or OpenACC.

martinpw2• 7 years ago

Relevant given the article topic - Cray is ending OpenACC support:

https://twitter.com/hpc_guru/status/1113565651350589441

pcvarmint• 7 years ago

This 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/

[1] http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsa...

[2] http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/craytalk/sld001.htm

hn23• 7 years ago

RIP Cray

Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray

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