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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

That would run into trademark problems:

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

Would it? I'm not an expert on trademark law but isn't HPC a generally well established generic & technical term?

I agree. I think problems would be more likely if they started a directly competing product with HPC in the name, but an unofficial acronym for the joint name of 2 merged companies? I don't see it.

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.

If HPC is a generic term for HPCs, then the company wouldn't be able to prevent competitors from marking their competing products as HPCs. So an HPC mark may have limited value. It would be like having a water company called WATER; you could do it, but you'd never be able to prevent other water companies from calling their products water.

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.

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

We are cray cray would be even better.

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

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.

>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

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).

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

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

I haven't been working in supercomputing for 25 years any more and my first reaction to the headline was "Oh, Cray does still exist?". But obviously my intuition wasn't too wrong, the surprise should have more been "Oh, the Cray name does still exist", but that's of course not an equally big surprise.

And before Tera, SGI bought Cray in 1995.

CrayLink was awesome. I worked for a web hoster in the late 90s that was big on SGI and we'd abuse temporary CrayLinks between two Origin 200s to upgrade storage or spin off sites to a new server with minimal service impact.

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

Both 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.

Most 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.

HP, Compaq and EDS.

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