HPE, Cray release comprehensive HPC and AI offerings optimized for exascale computing on premises, in the cloud, or as-a-service

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced Thursday that it will deliver comprehensive high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) portfolio for the exascale era, which is characterized by explosive data growth and new converged workloads such as HPC, AI, and analytics.

The addition of Cray Inc., which HPE recently acquired, bolsters HPE’s HPC and AI solutions to now encompass an end-to-end supercomputing architecture across compute, interconnect, software, storage and services, delivered on premises, hybrid or as-a-Service. Now every enterprise can leverage the same foundational HPC technologies that power the world’s fastest systems, and integrate them into their data centers to unlock insights and fuel new discovery.

Digital transformation is driving new data-intensive workloads and real-time analytics operating at an unprecedented scale. New software, compute, interconnect, and storage capabilities are required for customers to unlock the potential of their data and accelerate innovation. 

HPE delivers solutions for any experience from single, small systems all the way to exascale-class supercomputers with tailored software, interconnect and storage capabilities. This includes solutions for modeling and simulation in weather forecasting, manufacturing and energy sectors, and AI and big data analytics in precision medicine, autonomous vehicles, geospatial imaging and financial services.

Cray debuts ClusterStor E1000 storage to power data-driven workloads including AI, analytics, simulation and modeling

Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company unveiled on Wednesday its Cray ClusterStor E1000 system, a new parallel storage platform for the exascale era. ClusterStor E1000 addresses the explosive growth of data from converged workloads and the need to access that data at improved speed, by offering an optimal balance of storage performance, efficiency and scalability, effectively eliminating job pipeline congestion caused by I/O bottlenecks. 

Cray ClusterStor E1000 systems will be available starting in the first quarter of next year. 

The next-generation global file storage system has already been selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) for use at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the first three US exascale supercomputers will be housed (respectively Aurora, Frontier and El Capitan).

With the introduction of the ClusterStor E1000 storage system, Cray has completed the re-architecture of its end-to-end infrastructure portfolio, which encompasses Cray Shasta supercomputers, Cray Slingshot interconnect, and the Cray software platform. With Cray’s next-generation end-to-end supercomputing architecture, available for any datacenter environment, customers around the world can unleash the full potential of their data.

Recognizing data access challenges presented by the exascale era, Cray’s ClusterStor E1000 enables organizations to achieve their research missions and business objectives faster. ClusterStor E1000 systems can deliver up to 1.6 terabytes per second and up to 50 million I/O operations per second per rack – more than double compared to other parallel storage systems in the market today.

The new system also deliver purpose-engineered end-to-end PCIe 4.0 storage controllers serve the maximum performance of the underlying storage media to the compute nodes and new intelligent Cray software, ClusterStor Data Services, allows customers to align the data flow with their specific workflow, meaning they can place the application data at the right time on the right storage media (SSD pool or HDD pool) in the file system.

An entry-level system starts at 30 gigabytes per second and at less than 60 terabytes usable capacity. Customers can start at the size dictated by their current needs and scale as those needs grow, with maximum architectural headroom for future growth. 

The ClusterStor E1000 storage system can connect to any HPC compute system that supports high speed networks like 200 Gbps Cray Slingshot, Infiniband EDR/HDR and 100/200 Gbps Ethernet.