Your Own Supercomputer — in the Azure Cloud

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Your organization relies on technology for a competitive advantage. You need fast, reliable performance. But high-performance computing can be a big investment, and challenging to manage as part of your IT infrastructure. Cray and Microsoft make it easy — and you get Cray supercomputing in the Microsoft Azure cloud. This convergence of supercomputing capabilities and the ease of cloud management enables disruptive innovation for new categories of companies. It alleviates the management burden and reduces barriers of entry to HPC. Supercomputing is no longer out of reach for smaller enterprises and organizations that can’t or don’t want to maintain their own datacenters. Get details about Cray in the cloud in this white paper by ... [ Read More ]

Cray Graph Engine Takes on a Trillion Triples

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One trillion. That’s quite a large number. It’s 132 times the number of people on Earth; five times the number of tweets posted in a year on Twitter; the number of search engine queries Google serves in five months; and now equivalent to the number of triples we’ve loaded, inferenced and queried using our own Cray Graph Engine. At last week’s Cray User Group (CUG) meeting, a paper submitted by a team of Cray engineers — Chris Rickett, Utz-Uwe Haus, Jim Maltby and Kristi Maschhoff — received the 2018 Best Paper Award for “Loading and Querying a Trillion RDF Triples with Cray Graph Engine on the Cray XC.” I am a marketing guy, so I think of achievements in terms of “first, only or best.” We know Cray isn’t your only option for graph ... [ Read More ]

Hyper-Personalize Your Customer Experience Using Big Data

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It is an exciting and anxiety-inducing time to be tasked with taking the customer experience to the next level. That should, frankly, include everyone in your organization. We’re caught up in a marketing hamster wheel that calls for hitting our customers with messaging and optimizing the same systems, over and over and over. Are incremental improvements the best we can do? Let’s take a look at how marketing is done today when it is executed in an “ideal” state: Meet Sia. Sia is serious about golf and wants to improve her game. Imagine that you design, market and sell the latest high-tech golf equipment. After having seen your digital mobile ads a few times, she finally clicks on one and is taken to your landing page. She goes home ... [ Read More ]

Building a Computing Architecture for Drug Discovery

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We recently had the pleasure of helping Jason Roszik and his colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in developing a high-throughput architecture supporting their work in identifying combination therapies for cancer. This work sits at the interface of some major technology, processing and clinical trends, and it was quite an eye-opener — as well as a motivation — for us on how to use Cray-developed systems and processing technologies to build a useful and productive high-throughput IT architecture. The first trend, of course, is next-generation sequencing (NGS). Costs are going down and sequencing throughput is going up dramatically, to where today’s NGS companies state they can process tens of human genomes a ... [ Read More ]

Scalable Deep Learning with BigDL on the Urika-XC Software Suite

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Deep-learning-based AI approaches have resulted in remarkable advancements in diverse fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and bioinformatics. As part of our continuing efforts to offer customers a single system that can host both simulations and advanced data analytics, we recently launched the Cray® Urika®-XC analytics software suite, bringing graph analytics, deep learning and robust big data analytics tools to the company’s flagship line of Cray® XC™ supercomputers. An important piece of the Urika-XC suite is the BigDL deep learning framework. BigDL is a distributed deep learning library for Apache Spark™ developed inside Intel and contributed back to the open source community. ... [ Read More ]