5.16.17
Global supercomputer leader, Cray Inc. and Markley, a premier provider of data center space and cloud computing services, today announced a partnership to provide supercomputing as a service solutions that combine the power of Cray supercomputers with the premier hosting capabilities of Markley. Through the partnership, Markley will offer Cray supercomputing technologies, as a hosted offering, and both companies will collaborate to build and develop industry-specific solutions.
The availability of sought-after supercomputing capabilities both on-premises and in the cloud has become increasingly desirable across a range of industries, including life sciences, bio-pharma, aerospace, government, banking, and more – as organizations work to analyze complex data sets and research, and reduce time to market for new products. Through the new supercomputing as a service offering, Cray and Markley will make it easier and more affordable for research scientists, data scientists, and IT executives to access dedicated, powerful compute and analytic capability to increase time to discovery and decision.
“The need for supercomputers has never been greater,” said Patrick W. 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.”
Headquartered in Boston, Markley delivers best-of-breed cloud and data center offerings, including its enterprise-class, on-demand Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution that helps organizations maximize IT performance, reduce upfront capital expenses, increase speed to market, and improve business continuity. In addition, Markley guarantees 100 percent uptime, backed by the industry’s best Service Level Agreement.
“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. We are excited to partner with Markley to create this new market for Cray.”
The first industry solution built by Cray and hosted by Markley 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 highly-scalable parallelization and performance of the Urika-GX platform. Cray and Markley have plans for the collaboration to quickly expand and include Cray’s full range of infrastructure solutions.
The Cray Urika-GX system is the first agile analytics platform that fuses supercomputing abilities with open enterprise standards to provide an unprecedented combination of versatility and speed for high-frequency insights, tailor-made for life sciences research and discovery.
“Research and development, particularly within life sciences, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, is increasingly data driven. 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. Combining the strengths of Cray and Markley into supercomputing as a service does exactly that.”
“HPC environments are increasingly being used for high-performance analytics use cases that require real-time decision making such as cybersecurity, real-time marketing, digital twins, and emerging needs driven by big data and Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. Augmenting your on-premises infrastructure with HPC clouds enables you to meet your existing SLAs while scaling up performance-driven analytics for emerging use cases,” notes Gartner, in Follow These Three Steps to Optimize Business Value from Your HPC Environments, by Chirag Dekate, September 16, 2016.
Cray and Markley will be hosting meetings to discuss the new supercomputing-as-a-service solution at Bio-IT World Conference and Expo, May 23-25, 2017, in Boston, at booth #452.
Cray and Markley will also host a live webinar, “Power Your Analytics with Supercomputing as a Service,” June 13th at 10:00 a.m. PDT.
