Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.
They used to do the whole shebang, back in the day. But it's been a long, long time since that was the case.
They were failing to keep up with Intel in fabrication process because of the massive capital and R&D expenditure required. They decided they would be better off having a choice of fab partners instead.
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.
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...
"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.
> 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
> If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
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.
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...
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
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...
I feel, it is the same type "aspirational" acquisition
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.
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-acquires-indu...
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.
There was a talk about it at LCA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSCvkU0UKIU
I bought a Compaq laptop with a 64-bit CPU for under $1000. It ran flawlessly for over a decade, needing only a new battery. I eventually gave it to my parents who still have it.
HP had already been racing to the bottom for years, though.
PS: Yes it's unfair to blame all this on Compaq, probably more a result of increasingly expensive semiconductor R&D.
However, on the more profitable inkjet side of the business we've been doing a lot of R&D and I don't think we've sold a single vacuum cleaner.
A friend of mine was working in Colorado and involved in that whole deal, it did't sound super pretty.
I'm not aware of any supercomputers built by Lenovo. IBM has built a lot.
There are plenty of System X HPC installs. They just no longer come from IBM. Even when IBM still owned the line, it was being outsourced. The University of California SRCS system from ~10 years ago was an iDataPlex sold to us by IBM. Most of the boards had Asus marked on them.
Also remember the System X line was sold way after the Think lines.
Currently highest ranked Lenovo is #8.
HPE truly is where greatness goes to die.
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.
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?
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...
Those were dark days.
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
On a related note, would they be more complimentary or competitive to HPC Server? Both Cray and HPE seems like they're more focused on the hardware and possibly userspace applications than a proprietary OS. I'm pretty sure modern Cray's are Linux-based, and I don't know if HP-UX is suited to running a supercomputer, but even so it doesn't seem like it's core to HP's business - just one of the products in their portfolio that can fit where needed.
Of course they could still call the company HPC, use the mark HPC for products or services other than HPCs, and use the mark CRAY for HPCs.
But people love short names.
Easy mnemonic: HP Ink. See bryanlarsen comment in this thread:
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).
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.
I could be completely 100% wrong.
For using GPU's, there's CUDA, or offloading with OpenMP or OpenACC.
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.)
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".)
Laser printers with a serial port? Maybe Centronics?
Both HP-PCL and PostScript (I wrote code to generate both) can be sufficiently compact. (And you had the trusty built-in fonts, plus sometimes additional fonts in cartridges/cards, so fonts didn't necessarily have to be sent with the print job.)
What could be a problem for connection via RS232 is large images, or an unfortunate setup that rasterizes the whole page off-printer at high dots-per-inch.
Probably not what OP means, but Mac printers all connected over serial
Its just the way capitalism works.
I would say that it is more to do with they way human nature works (in some people), than capitalism. Applies in every field of life, not just business.
When there's a heavy incentive to pursue this nature for more fundamental needs like food, family security, etc. then it takes a heck of a lot more will power to not participate.
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.
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.)
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.
Broadcom bought CA last fall - https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/financial-releases/237...