According to a recent press release, “Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray Inc., a global supercomputer leader, today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which HPE will acquire Cray for $35.00 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash. ‘Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data,’ said Antonio Neri, President and CEO, HPE. ‘Only by processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space and more. Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work’.”
The release goes on, “The explosion of data from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics and evolving customer needs for data-intensive workloads are driving a significant expansion in HPC. Over the next three years the HPC segment of the market and associated storage and services is expected to grow from approximately $28 billion in 2018 to approximately $35 billion in 2021, a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9 percent. Exascale is a growing segment of overall HPC opportunities and more than $4 billion of Exascale opportunities are expected to be awarded over the next five years. Addressing complex challenges and advancing critical academic research, including predicting future weather patterns, delivering breakthrough medical discoveries, and preventing cyber-attacks, requires significant computational capabilities, up to and through Exascale level architecture. Exascale capable systems enable solutions to these problems with much greater precision and insight.”
Read more at Business Wire.
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