Cray Announces Shasta Software to Power the Exascale Era

SEATTLE, Aug. 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ:CRAY) today announced an entirely new, open and extensible software platform to address the growing need for supercomputing across government and private industries. As advanced simulation, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation create new, data intensive workloads, the need for performance at scale is growing rapidly. Recognizing the challenges presented by the exascale era, Cray’s software fuses supercomputing performance and capability with the modularity, composability and ease-of-use of cloud computing. In a separate press release issued today, the Department of Energy (DOE), National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced that Cray has been awarded a third U.S. exascale system contract. The system, dubbed “El Capitan,” will be sited at LLNL. Cray now has $1.5 billion in business for Shasta™ supercomputing systems and the new software platform.

“The Shasta software used with the El Capitan system expands traditional supercomputing to support the complex workflows and numerous 3D studies necessary to unlock the full potential of exascale computing,” said Bill Goldstein, lab director at LLNL. “The flexibility and extensibility of El Capitan’s software and hardware environment will enable the NNSA laboratories to explore and develop capabilities that leverage the combination of AI and machine learning with modeling and simulation to accelerate time-to-solution for our national security codes. These technologies could apply equally well to multi-physics codes employed outside of the national security domain.”

Cray has a rich history of developing the most performant, scalable and reliable software in supercomputing. This is validated by the vast majority of global weather centers that rely on Cray to deliver time critical numerical weather forecasts. These weather centers are at the forefront of the convergence of HPC, AI and IoT workloads that operate at immense scale.

Cray’s new software platform improves performance and reliability by including new key capabilities:

• Extends traditional HPC batch workflow scheduling for modeling and simulation with new Kubernetes container orchestration to enable converged HPC and AI workflows.
• Adds support for multi-tenancy between HPC and AI partitions and sub-partitioning within AI jobs to enable workflow isolation.
• Provides highly resilient containerized services with separate compute and management planes to minimize planned and unplanned downtime.
• Creates an open supercomputing platform by including standardized and supported APIs for integration, data access and software ecosystem extensibility and interoperability.
• Delivers a new and fully integrated telemetry for the system as well as user application level monitoring to quickly correlate and remediate issues.

“As we enter the exascale era, modern applications are creating the need for applying supercomputing capability to a new class of digital transformation problems. What is the domain of a few national laboratories today is fast becoming a necessity for every enterprise,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO, Cray, Inc. “With our new software platform, Cray is delivering a fully featured, extensible software and tools environment that performs like a supercomputer and runs like a cloud. The same Cray technology that powers exascale systems can be delivered in a single, low-cost rack and ready to integrate into any data center environment.” 

With this next generation supercomputing software platform, Cray has addressed key requirements:

• Application development and portability: Developers can easily compose converged modeling, simulation, analytics and AI workflows using modern microservices and a robust suite of tools and compilers that support a broad spectrum of processors and accelerators. Applications can easily move from laptop to supercomputer for maximum scalability of code with minimal refactoring.
• Management and monitoring: IT administrators employ a unified systems management and telemetry framework to ensure production reliability for job execution and support high system availability.
• Interoperability: IT managers and administrators can deploy Cray technology with the assurance that both current and future requirements are covered with broad data center systems and software interoperability with the addition of documented APIs for automation and data access, and support for industry standard protocols.
• Investment protection: CXOs and business owners benefit from a multi-user and multipurpose platform with support for heterogeneous processor architectures (x86, AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, FPGAs and other accelerators) and the scalability to meet their rapidly growing analytics and AI initiatives.

“Shasta is designed to support extremely heterogeneous workloads not just from science and engineering, but also from the growing contingent of enterprises that acquire supercomputers to outcompete their rivals in the new era of digital transformation and AI,” said Steve Conway, COO and senior vice president of research at Hyperion Research. “Cray Shasta supercomputers aim to move leading enterprises beyond proof-of-concept to production, and to operate on premises or in the cloud. By integrating extremely heterogeneous requirements into the new Shasta system hardware and software, Cray has substantially expanded its addressable market to include enterprise analytics, AI and cloud computing.”

Cray’s new software platform will be available starting Q4 of 2019.  For more information, please contact your authorized Cray sales representative or www.cray.com.

Supporting Quotes
“The Department of Energy is the world leader in supercomputing and El Capitan is a critical addition to our next generation systems,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “El Capitan’s advanced capabilities for modeling, simulation and artificial intelligence will help push America’s competitive edge in energy and national security, allow us to ask tougher questions, solve greater challenges and develop better solutions for generations to come.”

“NNSA is modernizing the Nuclear Security Enterprise to face 21st century threats,” said Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty, DOE Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator. “El Capitan will allow us to be more responsive, innovative and forward-thinking when it comes to maintaining a nuclear deterrent that is second to none in a rapidly-evolving threat environment.”

About Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) combines computation and creativity so visionaries can keep asking questions that challenge the limits of possibility. Drawing on more than 45 years of experience, Cray develops the world’s most advanced supercomputers, pushing the boundaries of performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray continues to innovate today at the convergence of data and discovery, offering a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers, high-performance storage, data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions.  Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, including, but not limited to, statements related to Cray’s product development, sales, and delivery plans. These statements involve current expectations, forecasts of future events, and other statements that are not historical facts. Inaccurate assumptions and estimates as well as known and unknown risks and uncertainties can affect the accuracy of forward-looking statements and cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect actual future events or results include, but are not limited to, the risk that Cray is not able to successfully complete its planned product development efforts or to ship Shasta systems within the planned timeframe or at all, the risk that Shasta systems will not have the features, performance or components currently planned, the risk that processors planned for Cray Shasta systems or current Cray systems are not available when expected or with the performance or pricing expected, the risk that the systems ordered by customers are not delivered when expected, do not perform as expected once delivered, or have technical issues that must be corrected before acceptance, the risk that the acceptance process for delivered systems is not completed, or customer acceptances are not received, when expected or at all, the risk that Cray is not able to successfully complete the modifications to its subcontract with Intel for delivery of the system to Argonne when expected or at all, the risk that government funding to Cray for research and development projects is less than expected and such other risks as identified in Cray’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended June 30, 2019, in the Current Report on Form 8-K describing the Oak Ridge National Laboratory award filed May 7, 2019, in the Current Report on Form 8-K describing the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory award filed today and from time to time in other reports filed by Cray with the SEC. You should not rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this release. Cray undertakes no duty to publicly announce or report revisions to these statements as new information becomes available that may change Cray’s expectations.

CRAY and Shasta are registered trademarks of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.