HP Enterprise to Acquire Cray Inc for $1.3B

[S w a t s o n]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14358/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-acquire-cray-for-13-billion
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2019/05/hpe-to-acquire-supercomputing-leader-cray.html

Quote

San Jose, Calif., and Seattle, Wash., May 17, 2019 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) and Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY), a global supercomputer leader, today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which HPE will acquire Cray  for $35.00 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash

So it looks like HPE wants to pull its big boy pants back up after having lots of crazy ideas and technologies not really go anywhere. I think this acquisition makes sense just because of that. HPE invents or helps invent so many HPC technologies but I never seem to hear about them getting past concept or if they do, just failing at getting market traction. With Cray in it's portfolio, HPE can roll out those technologies in the best case scenarios.

Quote

HPE for its part has some supercomputing exposure as well, however it’s nothing on the scale of what Cray has done. So for HPE, the deal represents an opportunity for the firm to acquire the know-how and technology needed to augment and evolve their own supercomputer and HPC technologies. Among other things, this deal means HPE will be picking up Cray’s Shasta system architecture as well as their new Slingshot interconnect, both of which will be core parts of Frontier.

 

HPE will now get to claim the 2 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Quote

The timing of the acquisition announcement closely follows other major news from Cray: the company just landed a $600 million US Department of Energy contract to supply the Frontier supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021. Frontier is one of two exascale supercomputers Cray is involved in – the other being a subcontractor for the 2021 Aurora system – and in fact Cray is involved in the only two exascale systems ordered by the US Government thus far. So in both a historical and modern context, Cray was and is one of the biggest players in the supercomputing market.

 

I thought the purchase price of 1.3B was low, only about a $5 premium/share and the shares have now risen slightly above what HP is paying. I'm honestly kind of surprised one of the only two major US supercomputer vendors (IBM) was valued at so relatively little but hey there you go.

Spoiler

HPE has so much money they are just gonna pay it out in cash

Quote

As part of the transaction, HPE expects to incur one-time integration costs that will be absorbed within HPE’s FY20 free cash flow outlook of $1.9B to $2.1B that remains unchanged.

 

Interesting timeline I stole from some guy on reddit: (SGI being Silicon Graphics, a former supercomputer and graphics house that was responsible for the N64 and Nvidia existing)

Quote

1996: SGI buys Cray

1999: SGI sells Cray

2016: HPE buys SGI

2019: HPE buys Cray

 

[GrockleTD]

7 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14358/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-acquire-cray-for-13-billion
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2019/05/hpe-to-acquire-supercomputing-leader-cray.html

So looks like HPE wants to pull it's big boy pants back up after having lots of crazy ideas and technologies not really go anywhere. I think this acquisition makes sense just because of that. HPE invents or helps invent so many HPC technologies but I never seem to hear about them getting past concept or if they do just failing at getting market traction. With Cray in it's portfolio it can roll out those technologies in the best case scenarios.

 

HPE will now get to claim the 2 fastest supercomputers in the world.

 

I thought the purchase price of 1.3B was low, only about a $5 premium/share and the shares have now risen slightly above what HP is paying. I'm honestly kind of surprised the only major US supercomputer vendor was valued at so relatively little but hey there you go.

  Reveal hidden contents

HPE has so much money they are just gonna pay it out in cash

 

The idea that they can casually absorb this cost kind of disturbs me

[pas008]

isnt this powerful news for amd also? considering cray and amd partnership

[leadeater]

Oh wow so HPE absorbed SGI and now set to do the same to Cray, very interesting.

 

2 hours ago, pas008 said:

isnt this powerful news for amd also? considering cray and amd partnership

HPE already had there own partnership with AMD, from what I know that was going rather well. HPE was also I think doing some big research around Gen-Z, maybe that has something to do with acquiring Cray.

 

4 hours ago, GrockleTD said:

The idea that they can casually absorb this cost kind of disturbs me

1.3b is hardly anything for a company buyout in the tech sector, go look up the Dell purchase of EMC if you want your eyes to water lol.

[XenosTech]

7 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Dell purchase of EMC if you want your eyes to water lol.

They water every single time

[justpoet]

47 minutes ago, pas008 said:

isnt this powerful news for amd also? considering cray and amd partnership

Sort of.  If it were the case that HP Enterprise was pretty much just Intel, that would be the case.  However, HP Enterprise actually has entire lines of EPYC only server platforms (though also the same for Intel and ARM).  This probably helps further HPE's AMD proliferation even faster, but it isn't the same impact for AMD as if Dell (who has almost nothing for AMD offerings) bought Cray.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, pas008 said:

isnt this powerful news for amd also? considering cray and amd partnership

I would say it's mutual,  AMD having a product/policy that is worthy of a partnership and can be leveraged at this level of market is powerful for all parties involved.

[Bananasplit_00]

I'm not sure I feel like a company I associate with really shit inkjet printers and my godawful laptop are appropriate owners of Cray but sure

[S w a t s o n]

22 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

I'm not sure I feel like a company I associate with really shit inkjet printers and my godawful laptop are appropriate owners of Cray but sure

HP and HPE are now separate entities, HPE is a big player in the HPC market but not massive.

[Bananasplit_00]

Just now, S w a t s o n said:

HP and HPE are now separate entities, HPE is a big player in the HPC market but not massive.

Still has HP in the name so it's all the same to me

 

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Still has HP in the name so it's all the same to me

Careful, you might get an entire division or two of HPE employees coming to slap you.

[GOTSpectrum]

36 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Careful, you might get an entire division or two of HPE employees coming to slap you.

Hahaha!

 

But seriously, this is quite a big move, like really big, especially with the currently known contracts that are in the works.

[Results45]

On 5/17/2019 at 10:23 AM, S w a t s o n said:

.

Interesting timeline I stole from some guy on reddit: (SGI being Silicon Graphics, a former supercomputer and graphics house that was responsible for the N64 and Nvidia existing)

Quote

1996: SGI buys Cray

1999: SGI sells Cray

2016: HPE buys SGI

2019: HPE buys Cray

.

 

SGI machines are the best. 

 

Especially the one that cost a quarter-million dollars:

 

.

[power666]

On 5/17/2019 at 4:33 PM, leadeater said:

Oh wow so HPE absorbed SGI and now set to do the same to Cray, very interesting.

 

HPE already had there own partnership with AMD, from what I know that was going rather well. HPE was also I think doing some big research around Gen-Z, maybe that has something to do with acquiring Cray.

 

1.3b is hardly anything for a company buyout in the tech sector, go look up the Dell purchase of EMC if you want your eyes to water lol.

 

HPE has been doing a lot on the fabric side of things.  Gen-Z looks like an idea that was spawned for their "The Machine" research.  HPE's purchase of SGI got them NUMAlink which is used inside of the SuperDome Flex servers (though HPE doesn't scale them as large as SGI used to for various reasons).  Acquiring Cray puts another fabric designer into their portfolio while HPE is also promoting their own technology.  

 

This could be a response market changes as Mellanox is being purchased by nVidia.  Intel has been quiet about Omnipath so far this year and the on package options are missing from Cascade Lake Xeons.  Intel should be debuting 200 Gbit Omnipath this year.  What ever the case maybe, the number of companies providing fabric, or at least fabric that likely will not be tied to another kit of hardware (x86 + Omnipath, nVidia Tesla + Infiniband) is declining.*  This could be seen as a defensive move in the market to ensure that they have continued access to high speed fabrics.

 

HPE could be moving in an offense nature here too.  HP purchased Compaq many years ago with one of the motivators was acquiring the DEC Alpha architecture only to kill it off in favor of the partially HP developed Itanium chip.  A bit of a shell game happened where the Alpha assets was spun off into another company (which Intel quickly bought).  The result was a reduction in competition while freeing up a custom base who needed a new hardware platform to migrate to.  Unfortunately Itanium was a flop while the combination of x86-64 + Linux exploded in popularity in the data center.  HP's offense move here ended up shooting themselves in the foot.  Acquiring Cray would remove a competitor from the market as they are just beginning to push Gen-Z and Cray is one of the few companies which could produce an open market competitor.   The likes of OpenCAPI and CCIX do overlap a bit with Gen-Z in funcitonality but are focused more on internal system communication, not between systems which Gen-Z is attempting.  It would be difficult for history to repeat itself here.

 

*High speed Ethernet is an option for bandwidth but for HPC workloads, its high latency is often suboptimal.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, power666 said:

*High speed Ethernet is an option for bandwidth but for HPC workloads, its high latency is often suboptimal.

That's not a problem anymore, RDMA NICs match Infiniband latency and most high end adapters are CNAs now days anyway. Infiniband performance share and deployment share in the top 500 is getting rather small now, decreasing every year significantly. Most are deploying 25G, 40G and 100G Ethernet with a large contingent of 10G already existing (likely using first wave of RDMA).

 

Many companies are running for the hills now that Infiniband is single source/vendor now, risk is too high and Ethernet is now capable of the major advantages Infiniband once had over it. It's Intel's fault really, they brought out the only other Infiniband vendor to go down the Onmi-path track. Nvidia really has signed it's demise.

 

3 hours ago, power666 said:

HPE has been doing a lot on the fabric side of things.  Gen-Z looks like an idea that was spawned for their "The Machine" research.  HPE's purchase of SGI got them NUMAlink which is used inside of the SuperDome Flex servers (though HPE doesn't scale them as large as SGI used to for various reasons).  Acquiring Cray puts another fabric designer into their portfolio while HPE is also promoting their own technology.  

One of the big reasons HPE purchased SGI was their technology that synchronized CPU core clocks across the cluster, they then partnered with Intel to make custom SKUs with this technology in it.

 

3 hours ago, power666 said:

Gen-Z looks like an idea that was spawned for their "The Machine" research.

Not really, Gen-Z was an industry wide spec come about from multiple companies looking at memory semantic/memory centric philosophies. Gen-z was going to happen without The Machine but The Machine did utilize it and took it out of mere specification development and worked on actual implementation.

 

 

 

Also Gen-z is a protocol specification not a transport phy specification, that part is actually based on 802.3 (Ethernet).

 

Here's a good video on what each one is and why they exist or have existed (contains above slides).

 

 

HPE might have a lot of technology developed but the big thing they lack and why they aren't a competitor to anyone like Cray is because they have no implementation track record for such systems and nothing in the MPP area at all. Acquiring Cray is pretty logical move if you want to enter that market and get access to the require experience and expertise to make any new technology industry ready.

[S w a t s o n]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

Definitely agree with that last part, my question is how the fuck are Gen-Z accelerator cards going to work if the PHY is ethernet.....

Edit: Running ethernet protocol over pcie slot?



I'm not used to seeing the PHY protocol and the actual PHY connector (mechanicals) not match up. Wouldnt it have to run through the pcie phy layer no matter what?

[leadeater]

54 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Gen-Z accelerator cards going to work if the PHY is ethernet

Thinking of Gen-Z as accelerator cards isn't really the best way to look at it. Any device or component in the global system/fabric can have a Gen-Z controller in it, an SSD for example rather than using SATA or NVMe as it's communication/data protocol would instead use Gen-Z but that is only possible to other devices that also have a Gen-Z controller.

 

The whole approach to Gen-Z is everything is on a fabric, addressable and it's own entity. Rather than the SSD or GPU being connected to a computer and tied to it the SSD or GPU exists on the fabric and anything can talk to it, it does not need any assistance or coupling to a CPU, chipset or motherboard. This is why you would base the communication off 802.3 because you are matching up a switched fabric of devices that could be memory, storage, network or compute (CPU or GPU).

 

For the p2p side of it that is different and will utilize PCIe initially but will develop their own. I've not heard as many details in this area as I've mainly heard about Gen-Z in the context of the large fabric where you have a cabinet/rack that contains blocks of Compute, Memory, Storage and Network of any combination and this can span across cabinets/racks and even buildings.

 

Although now rather outdated here's some good information on Gen-Z, covers the short and medium/long haul stuff you want to know about.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/09/05/future-interconnects-gen-z-stitches-memory-fabric/

 

Gen-Z is completely breaking down the idea of a computer and making that a redundant concept in the current traditional form. Why does a CPU/system need exclusive ownership or control over a GPU, why can't you access that unused pool of memory in the adjacent server chassis etc.

Gen-Z also isn't looking to completely displace what we currently have now either, you can take an exist system and put a device in it that has Gen-Z logic or media controller and participate in that fabric while behind that still be a traditional computer system with a CPU that has ram attached to it etc but also be able to access Gen-Z pooled memory or GPU.

[ARikozuM]

One step closer to Mega City One. 

 

[laughs in corporate tone]

[S w a t s o n]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

I know that it's only a small portion but I still want to know how the initial pcie cards will operate if they are truly using ethernet

[The King of the Undead]

On 5/17/2019 at 4:33 PM, leadeater said:

Oh wow so HPE absorbed SGI and now set to do the same to Cray, very interesting.

 

HPE already had there own partnership with AMD, from what I know that was going rather well. HPE was also I think doing some big research around Gen-Z, maybe that has something to do with acquiring Cray.

 

1.3b is hardly anything for a company buyout in the tech sector, go look up the Dell purchase of EMC if you want your eyes to water lol.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, S w a t s o n said:

I know that it's only a small portion but I still want to know how the initial pcie cards will operate if they are truly using ethernet

I don't think they are, for the p2p it's Gen-Z over PCIe rather than Gen-Z over fibre 802.3.

[S w a t s o n]

52 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I don't think they are, for the p2p it's Gen-Z over PCIe rather than Gen-Z over fibre 802.3.

Wouldnt that just make it PCIE 4 then? I know CCIX/CXL is somehow integrating their own standard over PCIE too right? Would it be done the same way but just ethernet instead?

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Wouldnt that just make it PCIE 4 then? I know CCIX/CXL is somehow integrating their own standard over PCIE too right? Would it be done the same way but just ethernet instead?

In this case the PCIe is just the transport layer with Gen-Z encapsulated in side of it. Much like you can do IPoIB, FCoE etc, it's just a way to create the communication link but the magic happens a layer above it.

[S w a t s o n]

Just now, leadeater said:

In this case the PCIe is just the transport layer with Gen-Z encapsulated in side of it. Much like you have do IPoIB, FCoE etc, it's just a way to create the communication link but the magic happens a layer above it.

See, they should just say pcie and ethernet for the PHY then instead of this "mechanicals" nonsense.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

See, they should just say pcie and ethernet for the PHY then instead of this "mechanicals" nonsense.

When there's actual products on the market I expect it's going to be way easier to understand with a lot better information, I don't even doubt I've gotten certain things wrong. I just wish it would hurry up.