Cray Still the Fastest Supercomputer

TechFlash reports: Peter Ungaro is president and CEO of Cray Inc., the Seattle-based supercomputer maker. A Cray XT5 supercomputer, dubbed Jaguar, recently grabbed the No. 1 slot on a list of the world's Top 500 fastest supercomputers. Ungaro talked to TechFlash about what makes a supercomputer, jaguars versus Krakens, and running a Seattle company while living in Spokane.

What does supercomputer look like?

A lot of refrigerator-sized cabinets chock full of processors. We put about a thousand processors in a single cabinet, and then we connect them all up with a fast network. Just think of a lot of cabinets. If you think about some of our machines, it could be a basketball-sized court filled with cabinets.

I understand some of the supercomputers are covered with artwork?

The front of the cabinets we actually customize for our customers. We have some amazingly cool-looking cabinets. The largest supercomputer we have, our system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it has a jaguar leaping across the front of the cabinet. Another system at the University of Tennessee—it’s the Kraken. It’s the mythical sea monster, like an octopus on steroids. I have twin eight-year-old boys, and one of them, his favorite picture is the Kraken. He has a poster of it in his room. And the other one likes the jaguar.

What distinguishes a “supercomputer” from a high-functioning computer?

If you think about a supercomputer, it’s really something that’s capable of doing hundreds of thousands times more than you can do on a normal server or your home PC machine. Where you can do a small weather forecasting our your home computer, on a supercomputer you can do it very quickly and you can have resolutions to a mile to 50 miles or a 100 times grid size. It has the capability to do realistic models.

What are some examples of how Cray supercomputers are being used?

I’ll give you one local example. Boeing is using a supercomputer to calculate airflow over the wing on the 787. We have other customers that are looking for new sources of energy. That’s big one. We have a number of customers that are working on climate change, trying to understand the climate and trying to understand all the effects of what’s happening with our climate and do some predictions around policy change around the world. And we have a number of our customers at different departments of defense around the world protecting borders and understanding how to protect people.

What’s next for supercomputers?

Today the largest scale computers are what we call petascale computers. It’s based on how many calculations per second they can do (a quadrillion). We’re thinking of something right now that will be available over the next 10 years or less that is a three times order above that: exascale. Add three more zeros and that’s what we’re thinking. Supercomputers aren’t getting smaller but we’re getting lots more power into each supercomputer. For instance, the fastest supercomputer in the world today, which is (a Cray) XT5, it has 225,000 processors in it. And we’re talking about machines that will have well over a million or 10 million processors in it.

What’s the difference between a supercomputer and a commercial data center?

What’s different is that with a commercial data center, people are running lots of little jobs across the machine. A Bing or a Google search is a small transaction, but there are just millions of them that run at the same time. Our customers are using all those processors for just one or two or a few jobs at any one time. We have to make all the processors work as one machine. We tie them together very tightly. We develop customer technologies, both hardware and software, to make them work as one big machine.

How many people work at Cray?

850. We have 140 in Seattle, and two other very large offices in St. Paul and Chippewa Falls (Wisconsin), and those office are around a couple hundred people each. We have over 100 people outside the U.S, both sales and service and support.

How important are international sales for Cray?

About 30 percent (of sales) happen outside the U.S. Some years it’s higher or lower. That’s been a big part of our growth. It’s really all over. Europe is obviously our biggest geography outside the Americas. We have large systems in Korea, India, Japan, Australia, all over. Many of the people that buy our largest supercomputers are government, government-related or government-funded in some way.

You run a Seattle company but live in Spokane. How does that work?

When I came to Cray I was living in Spokane. Not only do we have our main office in Seattle but two large offices in the Midwest, in St. Paul and Chippewa Falls. Going between all of our offices and spending time with customers, since I was on the road all the time, it made sense to keep my family where they are and travel when I need to travel.

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Eric Engleman writes for TechFlash, the Puget Sound Business Journal's technology blog.