
Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray - jeremiahlee
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cray-m-a-hpe/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-buy-supercomputer-maker-cray-in-1-30-billion-deal-idUSKCN1SN1CN
======
davidmr
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.

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

~~~
gumby
HPE (enterprise) was split from the slow-growing printer company a few years
ago

~~~
martinpw
And test and measurement was spun out 20 years ago. I think the post you are
replying to is attempted sarcasm.

~~~
gumby
Ah now I see it — whooshed over me

------
pcvarmint
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/](https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/)

[1] [http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-
newsa...](http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-
newsarticle&ID=1756786)

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

------
ckastner
One 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
Another 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
My favorite:

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

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ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
jngreenlee
>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
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

~~~
reilly3000
HP was big on hype. HPE spun off in 2017 and is big on contracts.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
plus its not quite the end of the decade. maybe a miracle will occur ;-)

------
jmpman
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?

~~~
aetimmes
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.

~~~
pinewurst
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...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-acquires-industry-
leading-high-performance-computing-interconnect-technology-and-
expertise/#gs.cmt9dr)

~~~
BooneJS
And the Q-Logic IB business.

------
astrodust
Slowly 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
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.

~~~
zwieback
Notable exception: Compaq

~~~
subway
Arguably, HPE has more of a Compaq legacy than HP legacy. Much of their x86
server line has a Compaq lineage.

~~~
ColanR
My rule of thumb for buying laptops (since the mid 2000s) has been that compaq
is the bottom-rung cheap brand that should always be avoided. Not sure their
survival has been a good thing.

~~~
astrodust
Brand necrophilia. Compaq consistently built better gear than HP before being
absorbed. HP used that brand for their junk as a way of getting back at
Compaq.

~~~
mpa000
Wrong. Compaq had much higher DOA and other defects in the mid 90s. They
relied on customer institutional memory from the 80s when they really were the
best.

~~~
bdcravens
Sounds like Apple's current laptop strategy.

------
tombert
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?

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

------
boulos
Now official with a primary source: [https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-
release/2019/05/hpe...](https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-
release/2019/05/hpe-to-acquire-supercomputing-leader-cray.html)

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

------
gbrown_
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...](https://www.ornl.gov/news/us-department-energy-and-cray-deliver-
record-setting-frontier-supercomputer-ornl)

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

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

~~~
ddebernardy
That would run into trademark problems:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_HPC_Server_2008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_HPC_Server_2008)

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

~~~
TallGuyShort
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.

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

~~~
joshmn
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.

------
compuguy
Duplicate article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936562)

------
closeparen
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?

~~~
jabl
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.

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

[https://twitter.com/hpc_guru/status/1113565651350589441](https://twitter.com/hpc_guru/status/1113565651350589441)

~~~
jabl
Indeed, OpenMP offload and OpenACC seem so close to each other (Disclaimer, I
haven't used either) that it's probably better if the world would converge on
one of them.

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

~~~
gonzo
1995

------
C1sc0cat
Oh well that's Cray Runined

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

~~~
neilv
The 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".)

~~~
thrower123
Those old LaserJets are absolutely bulletproof. My parents are still using the
one we bought with our very first 486 clone in the mid 90s. I had to mod it a
little to swap the serial port for USB a decade or more ago, but it is still
cranking along.

~~~
jacquesm
> serial

Laser printers with a serial port? Maybe Centronics?

~~~
neilv
I usually used Ethernet-connected ones, but I'd think RS232 serial at a doable
bit rate was viable for most purposes.

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.

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

~~~
xtreme
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.

------
azinman2
End of an era. Long live Cray!

~~~
dkersten
I would say the Cray era ended in 1996 when Cray merged with SGI (and with a
the founders death)

~~~
moonbug
Ironically, HPE bought SGI a couple of years ago.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
They 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
It'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
> Also Computer Associates, wherever they are now.

Broadcom bought CA last fall -
[https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/financial-
releases/237...](https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/financial-
releases/2375294)

~~~
basch
and Broadcom is a spinoff of HP.

~~~
dkersten
Its like... tech company incest.

------
bytematic
Better serve Linies still!

------
hn23
RIP Cray

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ngcc_hk
Wow!

