Cray delivers Analytics at Supercomputing scale with Urika-XC

Cray has announced the launch of Cray Urika-XC analytics software suite, a software solution that brings graph analytics, machine learning and data analytics tools to the Cray Urika, the supercomputing giant’s flagship line of supercomputers.

The new software solution enables data scientists to make breakthrough discoveries previously hidden amidst massive data sets. They can now use Cray’s supercomputing skills and the new tools to achieve time-to-insight while leveraging the scale and performance of Cray XC supercomputers.

“The massive growth of data is overpowering the capabilities of commodity clusters and constraining the boundaries of critical research,” said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. “Customers will be able to unlock sophisticated big data analytics at supercomputing speeds with the Urika-XC software suite, and leverage AI toolkits and world-class supercomputing technologies to do what they could never do before.”

The Urika-XC solution is essentially a set of powerful tools optimized to run seamlessly on the Cray systems and will empower data scientist to pursue their research without the burden of the data slowing them down. It is also re-engineered to take advantage of Cray’s highly scalable architecture including its Aries network interconnect.

The main advantage of the software suite is that it lets analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads run alongside scientific modeling and simulations on Cray XC supercomputers. This eliminates a lot of time spent on moving files from system to system, decreasing the time and cost expenditure.

The software package comes with a number of software and tools like Cray’s very own Graph engine, the Apache® Spark™ analytics environment, the BigDL distributed deep learning framework for Spark, the distributed Desk parallel computing libraries for analytics and also includes widely used analytics languages like Python, Java, Scala and R. The Cray-XC Analytics software suite will be available in the third quarter of this year.