Cray to Sell Dell's Computers for Use in Clusters
By CHRIS GAITHER
February 4, 2002
nytimes.com
Cray Inc. (news/quote), the maker of some of the world's fastest supercomputers, plans to announce a deal today to resell smaller computers by Dell that can be linked into clusters of processors that solve complex problems.
With the three-year agreement, Dell, the leading maker of PC's and second only to Compaq in sales of data-serving computers known as servers, hopes to build more of a presence in high-performance computing through Cray's relationships with scientists in government and industry.
For Cray, which earned its legacy by building huge supercomputers that performed trillions of calculations a second, the deal is an attempt to fend off a strong threat from so- called clusters: tens or hundreds of less-expensive computers, connected by high-speed networks, that each tackle a small piece of the problems once handled by one extremely powerful machine.
"Part of it is protection for Cray, saying, `If this is the way the market is going, we have to figure out a way to play here,' " said Michael R. Swenson, a research analyst with the International Data Corporation. |
