HPE to buy Cray, offer HPC as a service

HPE has agreed to buy supercomputer-maker Cray for $1.3 billion, a deal that the companies say will bring their corporate customers high-performance computing as a service to help with analytics needed for artificial intelligence and machine learning, but also products supporting high-performance storage, compute and software. In addition to bringing HPC capabilities that can blend with and expand HPE's current products, Cray brings with it customers in government and academia that might be interested in HPE's existing portfolio as well. The companies say they expect to close the cash deal by the end of next April. Such a service could address periodic enterprise need for fast computing that might otherwise be too expensive, says Tim Zimmerman, an analyst with Gartner. Businesses could use the service, for example, to create digital twins of their entire networks and use them to test new code to see how it will impact the network before deploying it live, Zimmerman says.