Supercomputing At The Crossroads
The supercomputing business, the upper stratosphere of the much broader high performance computing segment of the IT industry, is without question one of the most exciting areas in data processing and visualization.
It is also one of the most frustrating sectors in which to try to make a profitable living. The customers are the most demanding, the applications are the most complex, the budget pressures are intense, the technical challenges are daunting, the governments behind major efforts can be capricious, and the competition is fierce.
This is the world where Cray, which literally invented the supercomputing field, and its competitors live. About the only thing more intense these days is the ODM environment where the hyperscalers design and build their massive infrastructure.
Despite the rosy proclamations about how healthy the HPC market is and an uptick in supercomputer spending in the first half of 2017, Cray has contended for quite some time that there is actually a slowdown in the supercomputing sector. Moreover, this slowdown hits Cray the hardest because it is the dominant player up where scalability and performance matters most. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts going over its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2017, Cray chief executive officer Pete Ungaro explained that the target markets in which Cray plays were down by more than 60 percent compared to the levels those markets were at back in the local maximum peak set in 2015. If you do the math on Cray’s financial results, comparing 2015 to 2017, the company’s revenues have dropped by 46 percent. When you contract by less than your target market does, that is called winning, even if it does not feel as good as the extraordinary growth that Cray rode up in 2015.
Read More – The Next Platform |
