Intel scores supercomputer gig with Cray

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 29 April 2008 02:20

IT Industry - Deals

Cray - the company once practically synonymous with supercomputers - is hitching up with Intel.

A multi-year agreement between Cray and Intel is expected to bear its first fruit in the early 2010s, possibly in the form of the 'Cascade' system that the supercomputer company is developing for DARPA.

Cray currently uses AMD processors exclusively, and will continue to offer them in its systems.

The two companies will jointly investigate various aspects of high-performance computing, including multi-core processing and advanced interconnects.

"We're excited at the potential of bringing together Intel's powerful silicon expertise and Cray's industry leadership in scalable HPC systems," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

Patrick Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said "Throughout Cray's history, it has been an innovator in high-end HPC while Intel has pushed the boundaries of processor technology."

"The combination of this industry leadership and technical strength will allow HPC users to take advantage of future Xeon and other Intel processor technologies," he added.

This joint R&D may help Cray remain in the supercomputer race. It supplied three of the world's ten fastest computers (four IBMs also made the list), but unlike IBM, HP and Sun it does not have a general-purpose computer business to help amortise costs or even out cash flow. But while it is capable of attracting major contracts such as the one from DARPA that saw Cray and IBM share just short of $US500 million, that doesn't really seem a problem.