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.
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.