HPC News: Intel, Cray, Data Direct Networks, SGI

Here’s our review of some of today’s noteworthy links for the high performance computing industry:

Intel acquires Cray Interconnect program.  Intel (INTC) announced an agreement with Cray to acquire assets related to its high-performance computing (HPC) interconnect program. With the agreement, Intel gains access to Cray’s interconnect personnel and intellectual property. Up to 74 Cray employees will join Intel in the $140 million deal. "This agreement is evidence of the leadership position we've established in high performance computing, and is an exciting win for our customers, our company and our shareholders," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. Cray will retain certain rights to use the assets and intellectual property transferred to Intel in its products. "By broadening our relationship with Intel, we are positioned to further penetrate the HPC market and expand on our industry-leading technologies in support of our Adaptive Supercomputing vision. Our product roadmap remains intact as we continue to build the highly differentiated, tightly integrated supercomputers that our customers have come to expect from Cray. This agreement also dramatically strengthens our balance sheet and increases our options for further growth, profitability and creating shareholder value."

DDN selected by NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer.  DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has selected the DDN SFA12K storage array to build an unparalleled system delivering 100GB/s of storage performance for archiving data on the upcoming Blue Waters supercomputing system. NCSA selected DDN SFA12K storage systems with InfiniBand connectivity to consolidate their archive infrastructure using only a small number of very high-speed DDN enterprise storage systems. “Since 2002, DDN has partnered with NCSA on world-leading supercomputing endeavors and has been associated with each of their major computing initiatives,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DDN. “We are pleased to once again work with NCSA and be part of the Blue Waters project, which will play a critical role in enabling breakthrough advancements in many fields of science.”

SGI UV used for Big Data problems.  SGI announced that researchers in the compute-intensive field of biotechnology research are continuing to make breakthrough progress with their selection of the SGI UV high performance computing (HPC) system. Researchers at the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at University of Illinois at Chicago are working on the development of new therapeutics focused on the treatment of infectious diseases, critical with the advent of new resistant bacterial strains and ineffective treatments for many diseases. "Researchers at the Center have been using SGI IRIX OS-based clusters for the past decade, and have now migrated to an SGI UV high performance compute solution powered by large arrays of Intel Xeon series processors and NVIDIA Tesla series GPUs," said Michael E. Johnson, professor and director emeritus at the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at UIC. "These clusters provide computing flexibility in managing both serial and parallel calculations, and the forward compatibility of SGI systems have allowed us to seamlessly evolve and expand our computing power through the years and keep up with the increasing complexity of the problems we need to address."