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HPE to buy supercomputer company Cray in $1.3bn deal

Data explosion and big data analytics behind Cray deal, claims HPE

HPE is to buy supercomputer maker Cray in a $1.3 billion deal.

The company has justified the acquisition of Cray, founded by Seymour Cray in 1972, on the grounds of the "data explosion" and the increasing need for powerful computers to crunch massive volumes of that data. These data challenges include analysing data from space probes, meteorological information, academic research and crunching DNA and other information related to the human body to develop medical breakthroughs.

It is also a sector of the hardware market - with associated services - expected to continue growing strongly for the foreseeable future.

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"Answers to some of society's most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data," said Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE.

He continued: "Only by processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space and more.

"Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work."

While HPE claims that the high-performance computing market will grow from $28 billion today to approximately $35 billion by 2021, Cray's revenues only account for a fraction of that figure, weighing in at $456 million in its most recent fiscal year.

Answers to some of society's most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data

Cray customers include the UK's Met Office, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, for whom it is building what could be the world's first exascale supercomputer.

Currently, the most powerful Cray computers on the Top500 list of the world's supercomputers are Piz Daint, installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, in fifth place; and, Trinity in sixth place, installed at the US Department of Energy.

The company was also part of an award with Intel for the first US exascale contract from the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, ordered just a month before the Oak Ridge contract, with Cray's portion of the deal valued at more than $100 million.

However, HPE will need to integrate the acquisition into its own supercomputer development division, and could also therefore face opposition to the deal on anti-trust grounds.

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HPE to buy supercomputer company Cray in $1.3bn deal

Data explosion and big data analytics behind Cray deal, claims HPE

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