Markley and Cray introduce supercomputing as a service
Tue 16 May 2017
Cray, Inc. has teamed up with Markley, a leading data center and cloud service provider, to offer supercomputing as a service.
Through this partnership, Markley customers will have the ability to access Cray supercomputing technologies, which Markley will provide as a hosted service. The two companies will work together to develop customized solutions for specific industries and clients.
The first industry-specific solution addresses the need for supercomputing power in the field of life sciences. The Cray Urika-GX for life sciences is a pre-integrated hardware-software solution created specifically for life sciences research and discovery.
Life sciences continues to be an industry that can benefit from access to supercomputers. Research projects, such as mapping the human genome, are increasingly data intensive and can prove too much for legacy systems.
The Urika-GX system is the first platform to combine supercomputing capabilities and open enterprise standards for flexible and versatile life sciences applications. It also includes the Cray Graph Engine (CGE) running on the Urika-GX platform to provide the pattern matching capability required for data analysis in the field.
Fred Kohout, SVP and chief marketing officer at Cray, said that offering supercomputing as a service will change the game for companies that require access to high-performance computing systems.
“Now any company that has needed supercomputing capability to address their business-critical research and development needs can easily and efficiently harness the power of a Cray supercomputer,” he said. “We are excited to partner with Markley to create this new market for Cray.”
Industries that could benefit from access to supercomputers include finance, government, aerospace, and pharmaceutical fields, to name a few. A supercomputer as a service solution is intended to provide easy to implement and affordable access to data analysis that would previously have been unattainable, either due to cost or availability of resources.
Boston-based Markley has a global footprint of over 3 million square feet of data center space, making it one of the largest data center developers in the world, and one of the few to guarantee 100% uptime for its customers.
Patrick Gilmore, CTO for Markley, noted that the need for access to supercomputing power is growing. “By making supercomputing and big data analytics available in a hosted model, Markley and Cray are providing organizations with the opportunity to reap significant benefits, both economically and operationally.”
