HPE to buy supercomputer maker in US$1.3B deal
HPE is set to acquire supercomputer manufacturer Cray in a deal valued at about US$1.3 billion.
HPE is set to acquire supercomputer manufacturer Cray in a deal valued at about US$1.3 billion.
A new alliance could see Microsoft partners get their hands on the computing power of supercomputer manufacturer, Cray, via the software vendor’s Azure platform.
A supercomputer developed by China's National Defense University remains the fastest publically known computer in the world while the U.S. is close to an historic low in the latest edition of the closely followed Top 500 supercomputer ranking, which was published on Monday.
To get an edge over China in the supercomputing arms race, the U.S. plans to build a 180-petaflop supercomputer that will be used mainly for scientific research.
On Jan. 14, the U.S. upgraded its main weather forecasting model, which subsequently did a very good job in predicting the track of last week's East Coast blizzard. It correctly predicted that heavier snows would be east of New York City, even as the official weather forecast -- based on a mix of computer models -- had the city getting buried in two feet of snow.
To better anticipate the next Sandy-size hurricane, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is upgrading the supercomputers it uses for predicting the weather.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will increase its computing power by ten-fold this year to a total of 5 petaflops worth of computing power, creating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, <a href="http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/20150105_supercomputer.html">the agency announced this week</a>.
Once a seething cauldron of competition, the twice-yearly Top500 listing of the world's most powerful supercomputers has grown nearly stagnant of late.
Cray has added more horsepower to its latest supercomputer, the XC40, and already has scored some big-time customers.
Human beings tend to take incremental change in stride. For example, the loaf of bread that was 50 cents a few decades ago that now costs $3 isn't a big deal to us because the price rose gradually and steadily year by year. What we aren't adapted for is exponential change. Which explains why we tend to be taken by surprise by developments that involve digital technologies, where order-of-magnitude improvements, driven by Moore's Law, occur continuously.
Stepping up its efforts to regain supercomputing dominance from China, the U.S. within the next two years will activate what could be one of the world's fastest computers.
Supercomputer vendor Cray is trying to make the Lustre file system easier to work with, allowing users to copy material from the file system into a multilayered storage archiving system.
Supercomputing power is being concentrated in a smaller number of machines, according to the latest Top 500 list of high-performance computers. Keepers of the list are uncertain how to parse that trend.
Helping scientific supercomputing take advantage of emerging big-data technologies, high-performance computing manufacturer Cray is releasing a set of packages promising to optimize the process of running Hadoop on the company's XC30 machines.
Supercomputer maker Cray has hired the founders and key engineers of Gnodal who will be working to develop new technology.