Seattle supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) is cutting about 50 jobs as it reconfigures its employee mix, according to a regulatory filing. The company didn’t specify what types of jobs were being cut, or say where they were located, other than to indicate the losses aren’t concentrated in any particular place or category.

Cray’s headquarters are in Seattle and its two other major domestic facilities are in St. Paul, MN, and Chippewa Falls, WI. Cray said the layoffs would be “substantially offset” by future additions in key areas including software development and custom engineering. Cray said those hiring plans mean its overall headcount will stay roughly flat this year. It looks like the news was first reported locally by The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley.

Spokesman Nick Davis says Cray had about 885 employees total at the end of 2010. The company’s job-posting site shows four jobs currently open in Seattle: director of compensation and benefits, financial analyst, senior product marketing manager and a software developer.

“We need to hire a significant number of employees in critical areas of the company to deliver on our growth plan, and we couldn’t do the hiring we need on top of our current cost structure,” Davis says. “This is a very difficult decision for us. We are working very hard to provide the support for those people who are directly impacted.”

Cray, a historic giant of the computing business, was on our radar screen quite a few times in 2010 as it continued to rack up large contracts worldwide. That included about $60 million from the University of Stuttgart, a $25 million partnership with Nvidia for DARPA projects, and $47 million from the Department of Energy.

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Seattle-based supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) has inked a contract deal with the University of Stuttgart, to deliver two supercomputers to the University’s High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The multi-year, multi-phase contract is worth an estimated $60 million. The first phase of the contract will take place in 2011, during which the Cray XE6 supercomputer will go into production at the university. The second supercomputer, the next-generation Cascade, will be delivered to the university in 2013. Cray says the Cascade is made possible, in part, by the company’s participation in the Defense Advance Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) High Productivity Computer Systems program earlier this year.

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Seattle-based Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), the supercomputing firm, announced today it has been awarded a $45 million, multi-year contract to provide the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) with a next-generation Cray supercomputer. The new computing platform, called Cielo, will support all three NNSA laboratories—Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The new supercomputer will be housed at Los Alamos and is slated to be delivered in the second half of this year.

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A new IBM supercomputer opened at Brown University’s Center for Computation and Visualization in Providence, RI, today is 50 times faster than Brown’s next best machine and is the most powerful computer in Rhode Island, according to an announcement from IBM (NYSE: IBM). Researchers at Brown and other institutions intend to use the 1,440-processor machine to model subjects such as the genomes of ocean-going microbes, the mechanics of human and animal movement, and the topography of other planets. Brown ordered the multimillion-dollar supercomputer in June; its exact cost hasn’t been disclosed, but IBM and Brown are calling it “a shared investment.”

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Seattle-based Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), the supercomputing company, announced late last week it has acquired the PathScale Compiler Suite assets from Maynard, MA-based SiCortex. Financial details were not released. SiCortex shut down in May. The purchase could help Cray improve its own compiler technology, as well as give PathScale customers a way to move forward on Cray supercomputers.

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Seattle-based supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) surprised analysts this morning by turning a modest profit in the second quarter, and was rewarded with a 12 percent bump in its stock price today.

Cray said today its revenues for the quarter ($62.7 million) increased by 34 percent compared with the same period last year ($46.7 million). That sales performance was enough to lift Cray to a profit of $3.4 million, compared with a $6.4 million loss it reported in the same period a year ago. This translated to a 10 cent per share profit in the quarter, which handily beat the consensus expectation of analysts, who forecasted a break-even quarter, according to First Call.

It has been a long road back for Cray, as I reported last week in an in-depth profile of the company. CEO Peter Ungaro told me Cray has become debt-free as of this spring (it had been saddled with $80 million of liabilities), and has been boosting its revenues through an aggressive three-pronged business strategy: selling high-end supercomputers to national laboratories, performing custom engineering and services, and selling lower-end machines to corporate customers through partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Intel. This strategy has been paying off handsomely, as the company announced several new contracts as part of its quarterly report—and this puts the company on sound enough footing to be profitable for the full year in 2009 and beyond.

Last month, Cray was awarded a multi-year contract with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The contract, worth more than $50 million, includes the delivery of a Cray XT5 supercomputer, which will be upgraded to a future-generation Cray machine. And just this week, Cray received a contract to upgrade its “Jaguar” machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar, which runs scientific applications at a rate of more than one petaflop (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second), will be upgraded to exceed two petaflops, which would make it the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The upgrade is expected to be installed by the end of this year.

“We’ve made tremendous progress on some of our new initiatives, expanding our product and service offerings to further solidify our leadership position in the industry,” Ungaro said in a statement. He added that Cray is delivering its supercomputing technology to a “broader set of customers,” and cited “over $70 million in new wins in just the last week.”

Cray has about 850 employees, 160 in the Seattle office. The company also has large facilities in Minnesota and Wisconsin, its original birthplace. (Cray Research was founded in 1972 by the renowned engineer Seymour Cray.) Its main competitors in supercomputing include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, Hitachi, and NEC.

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Where I grew up in the Midwest in the 1970s and early 80s, Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. Back then, a supercomputer was a top-flight machine that could perform a few hundred million floating point operations per second (“flops”). That was good enough to help scientists do intensive calculations in areas like weather forecasting, climate modeling, and nuclear weapons simulations. Cray’s first supercomputer, the famed Cray-1, was bought by Los Alamos National Laboratory for $8.8 million in 1976; eventually, some 80 of the machines were sold, for $5 million to $8 million a pop.

Today, your average desktop computer is far more powerful than a Cray-1, and so the definition of “supercomputer” keeps changing to keep up with the times. But one thing has not changed. Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) is still a major player in the space, despite a long history of ups and downs. The company, which began in 1972 as Cray Research in Chippewa Falls, WI, was bought by Silicon Graphics in 1996 for $767 million, and then was reborn in Seattle in 2000 following a $50 million merger with Tera Computer (which was renamed Cray). Since then, it has been a long uphill climb to get back near the top of the supercomputing heap against heavyweight competitors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Nobody better to tell that story than Peter Ungaro, the chief executive of Cray. I recently had a chance to speak with Ungaro by phone at his Spokane, WA, office about his company’s strategy and recent history, the technical challenges involved in modern supercomputing, and innovative ways of gaining new customers (how do you sell someone a $10 million machine?). What impressed me was his ability to lay out the financial concerns of his company while also diving deep into the technological aspects of supercomputers—how they will interact with cloud computing, how computational records will continue to be broken, and when computers might exceed all processing capabilities of the human brain.

First off, I wanted to know how Ungaro (left) defines a “supercomputer” these days. Some would say it should be one of the 500 fastest machines in the world. Others would say it’s a machine used for scientific and technical problems that costs more than a certain amount. Ungaro’s definition is simple and focuses on the bottom line. “We like to think of supercomputers as costing more than a million dollars,” he says.

Ungaro, a Washington State University alum, joined Cray in 2003 to run sales and marketing as senior vice president. He had been at IBM for 13 years, most recently running its high performance computing group, a $2 billion business inside Big Blue. Why did he make the jump to Cray? “I really loved the supercomputing space,” Ungaro says. “Customers are doing really interesting things. I really wanted to try and see what a smaller company was like. Even at $2 billion, you’re only 2 percent of IBM’s revenues.” In short, like many entrepreneurs, he wanted to have more impact. “There was no better place to go than Cray. It was a natural move.”

But Cray had its share of problems. The company had struggled to get its next-generation supercomputer product ready, and 2004 was “really rough,” Ungaro says. Cray was losing money and … Next Page »

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There’s no such thing as a free flop.

A “flop,” or floating-point operation, is a calculation involving a decimal number; engineers often measure the performance of computers in terms of the number of “gigaflop/s” (billions of floating-point operations per second) they can sustain. In the supercomputing community, it’s a longstanding ritual to compare various machines’ maximum gigaflop/s as they tackle standardized math problems called benchmarks. The world’s fastest computer—a 122,400-processor IBM machine at the Los Alamos National Laboratory called Roadrunner—can run at just over a million gigaflop/s, or 1.026 petaflop/s, according to Top500, the most prominent list of top supercomputing sites.

But as a general rule, the faster a computer runs, the more power it consumes—and the more waste heat it generates, and the more additional power is needed to run cooling systems. If current trends continue, according to McKinsey & Company, then by 2020 the electric plants needed to power the world’s data centers will be churning out more greenhouse gases than the entire airline industry. The problem is getting so serious that some organizations are having to scale back plans to upgrade their data centers with faster machines—not because they can’t afford them, but because local utilities can’t supply any more electricity.

Maynard, MA-based SiCortex serves the high-performance computing market, so it’s naturally obsessed with the gigaflops game—but with a twist. The six-year-old startup builds massively parallel computers with thousands of processors. The processors themselves aren’t very fast. They run at around 700 Megahertz, slower than the chips inside most desktop and laptop PCs, which saves a lot of electricity. But they’re wired together in a way that makes SiCortex’s computers extremely zippy nonetheless. And today SiCortex is proposing an overhaul in the way the performance of high-end computers is measured and ranked, one that would take a machine’s power consumption into account and reward machines that use it sparingly.

The company calls its new measuring system the Green Computing Performance Index, and it’s urging managers of government and academic supercomputing centers and corporate data centers to use it to evaluate the full benefits and costs of owning high-performance computing systems from companies like Cray, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and of course, SiCortex itself.

When evaluating the full cost of owning a high-performance computer, SiCortex argues, organizations should divide its performance in gigaflop/s by its power consumption in kilowatts. When you do that, a number of machines that are nominally faster than SiCortex’s machines—such Cray Inc.’s XT3 and XT4, IBM’s Blue Gene, and SGI’s Altix 8200EX—come out looking like power hogs. When running the standard Linpack benchmark, for example, an 1,100-processr Cray XT3 machine at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre gets just 17 gigaflop/s to the kilowatt, while a 1,458-processor SiCortex machine gets a comparatively huge 253 gigaflop/s to the kilowatt.

“If you look at the high-performance computing benchmarks that Top500 produces, it’s great stuff, but it doesn’t give you a measure of the actual energy efficiency of the computers themselves,” says Christopher Stone, SiCortex’s CEO. “Everyone in the high-performance computing business is running around talking about being green or wanting to be green, so we thought why not … Next Page »

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The Assabet River these days rushes through Maynard, MA, without lending any of its liquid muscle to local industry. But for more than a century, the river supplied power to the Assabet Woolen Mill, a vast brick complex that, in its heyday, was the largest source of wool for U.S. military uniforms. I went to the mill two weeks ago to visit computer maker SiCortex, which is just one of numerous high-tech startups, including Monster.com and 38 Studios, that have taken over the complex, now known Clock Tower Place. And when I saw how swiftly the Assabet flows past the old mill buildings, I was reminded that for some companies—including, increasingly, computing companies—rivers are still a prime source of power. Google, for example, spends so much money on electricity that the search giant decided to build its newest data centers near hydroelectric dams in Washington state, where electricity is cheaper.

As it turns out, SiCortex’s whole mission is to help organizations do lots of computing without having to worry so much about energy costs. The company makes massively parallel computers that contain thousands of individual processors, wired together in a way that lets them exchange data very quickly—so quickly that the processors themselves don’t have to be very fast in order for the machine as a whole to carry out trillions of operations per second. And because the processors in SiCortex’s machines run at a relatively pokey 700 Megahertz, they don’t consume nearly as much power (or give off as much waste heat) as the multi-Gigahertz processors hawked by the Intels of the world.

If you take power and cooling expenses into account, according to SiCortex, its machines are only one-third as costly to own and operate as equally fast Intel-based clusters. In fact, a SiCortex machine uses so little electricity that it can be powered by a small team of cyclists. The company organized just such a stunt at MIT last December, when 10 members of the MIT cyclocross team hooked stationary bikes up to generators and pumped out enough juice to run a fusion simulation. Of course, “That’s not a great way to power your computer system,” admits Matt Reilly, SiCortex’s co-founder and chief engineer. “The first thing we found out was that you have to cool the people pedaling the bikes. A really good bicyclist can sustain something like 300 watts, but normally they’re moving through the air while they do that. These guys were sweating like pigs.”

Reilly and co-founders Jud Leonard (now CTO) and John Mucci (a board member and the longtime CEO) came up with the basic idea for SiCortex’s fast but energy-efficient hardware back in 2002. The time needed to finish a computation, Reilly explained to me, is usually determined by three factors: the time required to do arithmetic in the CPU, the time required to move data around in memory, and the time required for input/output operations (that is, getting data into and out of the CPU). For parallel computers—which most of today’s high-performance computers are—there’s also a fourth factor: the communications time, or the time needed to move data between processors.

Semiconductor manufacturers have done an amazing job of speeding up both CPUs and memory chips over the last three decades (but at a high energy cost, as already mentioned). I/O operations are a still a bottleneck, though a variety of tricks exist for speeding them up. But Reilly, Leonard, and Mucci—all veterans of the famed Boston minicomputer company Digital Equipment Corporation—noted that nobody was really working on the fourth problem: reducing the travel time between processors in parallel machines. “That created an opportunity for a very small company to do very large things,” says Reilly.

In a machine with thousands of processors, you can’t simply string an Ethernet cable from each processor to every neighbor that it might need to communicate with. (Imagine how many phone lines would be coming out of your house if you needed a dedicated line to connect with every home or office you might want to dial.) To keep the number of wires manageable, a parallel machine’s “backplane” or communications mesh has to take the form of a … Next Page »

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Remember when a supercomputer was an exotic, multimillion-dollar machine that took up a whole room and churned out calculations for quantum physics, molecular modeling, and other big science? Now, thanks to Moore’s Law and improvements in electronic design, your desktop PC is probably more powerful than what would have been called a “supercomputer” in 1990. Nevertheless, companies like IBM, HP, and Cray (founded in its current incarnation in Seattle in 2000) are still making machines that crank out calculations much faster than anything that’ll sit on your desk anytime soon.

Today, Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) have announced they have teamed up to deliver a new supercomputer, the Cray CX1, designed for more mainstream users. The CX1 is priced as low as $25,000 (though it can cost $60,000 or more with options) and is targeted for financial services, aerospace, automotive, academic, digital media, and other applications. Its early customers include the Laboratory of NeuroImaging at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and financial consulting firm Milliman.

The CX1 is Cray’s most inexpensive supercomputer to date, and is the first to use Intel processors—and, more significantly, a Windows operating system, using Microsoft’s High Performance Computing (HPC) Server. For decades, Unix and Linux have been the operating systems of choice for supercomputers. So outsiders are skeptical about how well Windows will work for high-performance applications—Wade spoke with one earlier today: “It’s interesting to see what Microsoft is going to do,” said Christopher Stone, the CEO of technical-computing firm SiCortex in Maynard, MA. “They do single-node computing. I can’t imagine how they would adapt to massively parallel computing, even with this HPC Server they’re talking about.”

Some initial reactions from our office:

—Will the CX1 take 6 hours to boot up and give you 100 million pop-up windows per second?

—At $25K, it’s still a bit steep for the Xconomy budget… but I’m willing to try one. The gaming should be pretty excellent at least (and I’m not even a gamer).

—What even qualifies as a supercomputer these days? Certainly IBM’s BlueGene/L, and the U.S. military machine Roadrunner (built by IBM and Los Alamos National Lab). I wonder if large organizations will continue to push the state of the art in computing, or whether the little guys have enough power to create something new that’s distributed and organic—much as hackers invented a type of supercomputer in the late 1990s, now called “Beowulf-class,” using cheap clusters of Linux boxes.

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