Cray, Markley Team on Supercomputing as a Service

Seeking to make supercomputing horsepower more accessible to commercial data center users, Cray Inc. has teamed with Markley Group to introduce “supercomputing as a service” for life sciences firms in the Boston area. The new service will allow customers to run supercomputing workloads without the up-front expense of purchasing a system from Cray.

Markley Group operates One Summer Street, the primary carrier hotel in Boston, where the heavy concentration of biotech, pharmaceutical and genomics firms offers a ready customer base for the new offering.

“The need for supercomputers has never been greater,” said Patrick Gilmore, chief technology officer at Markley. “For the life sciences industry especially, speed to market is critical. 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.”

Growing Demand for HPC Horsepower

Markley will host the Cray supercomputer at One Summer Street, the company’s 920,000 square foot data hub, which is home to more than 90 connectivity providers. Markley and Cray will collaborate to build and develop industry-specific solutions.

Strong clusters of customers in higher education, biotechnology and the pharmaceutical sector drive demand for data center space in the Greater Boston market.

The growth of Big Data and analytics is boosting interest in High Performance Computing (HPC) and supercomputing, resource-intensive computing technologies that have been focused in research universities and government laboratories.

“Advances in genome sequencing technology mean that the sheer volume of data and analysis continues to strain legacy infrastructures,” said Chris Dwan, who led research computing at both the Broad Institute and the New York Genome Center.

“The shortest path to breakthroughs in medicine is to put the very best technologies in the hands of the researchers, on their own schedule,” Dwan continued. “Combining the strengths of Cray and Markley into supercomputing as a service does exactly that.”

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Focus on Life Sciences

“Cray and Markley are changing the game,” said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. “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.”

The new service will feature the Cray Urika-GX for life sciences – a complete, pre-integrated hardware-software solution. In addition, Cray has integrated the Cray Graph Engine (CGE) with essential pattern-matching capability and tuned it to leverage the Urika-GX platform.

Cray and Markley have plans for the collaboration to quickly expand and include Cray’s full range of infrastructure solutions.

Cray Inc. has a lengthy legacy as a pioneer in supercomputing. Its predecessor firm, Cray Research, was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray.