Cray offers supercomputing as a service in the cloud

Want a supercomputer but can't quite afford one? Cray and Markley may have the answer.

The supercomputer builder and cloud firm have teamed up to offer a Cray supercomputer hosted by Markley, offering supercomputing as a service.

The aim is to make it easier and cheaper for researchers, data scientists and executives to access the compute power they need to analyse massive amounts of data.

"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," said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer.

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The system will be developed to meet specific industries' needs, starting with life sciences using the Cray Urika-GX, which offers highly-scalable parallelisation and performance paired with open enterprise standards.

"For the life sciences industry especially, speed to market is critical," said Patrick Gilmore, chief technology officer at Markley, in a statement. "By making supercomputing and big data analytics available in a hosted model, Markley and Cray are providing organisations with the opportunity to reap significant benefits, both economically and operationally."

Chris Dwan, who led research computing at both the Broad Institute and the New York Genome Center, said that's key for increasingly data-driven areas of life sciences, bio-technologies and pharmaceutical companies. "Advances in genome sequencing technology mean that the sheer volume of data and analysis continues to strain legacy infrastructures," he said. "The shortest path to breakthroughs in medicine is to put the very best technologies in the hands of the researchers, on their own schedule. Combining the strengths of Cray and Markley into supercomputing as a service does exactly that."