Cray Bakes Big Data Software Framework Into Urika-GX Analytics Platform

Cray continued its courtship of the advanced scale enterprise market with today’s launch of the Urika-GX, a system that integrates Cray supercomputing technologies with an agile big data platform designed to run multiple analytics workloads concurrently. While Cray has pre-installed analytics software in previous systems, the new system takes pre-configuration to a new level with an open software framework designed to eliminate installation, integration and update headaches that stymie big data implementations.

Available in the third quarter of this year, the Urika-GX is pre-integrated with the Hortonworks Data Platform, providing Hadoop and Apache Spark. The system also includes the Cray Graph Engine, which can handle multi-terabyte datasets comprised of billions of objects, according to Cray. The Graph Engine runs in conjunction with open analytics tools for support of end-to-end analytics workflows, minimizing data movement. The system includes enterprise tools, such as OpenStack for management and Apache Mesos for dynamic configuration. Customization with Lustre is also possible.

The Urika-GX features Intel’s recently announced Xeon “Broadwell” cores, 22 terabytes of memory and 35 terabytes of local SSD storage capacity. Three initial configurations will be available in two-socket 16, 32, or 48 processor nodes (up to 1,728 cores per system) delivered in a 42U 19-inch rack. Cray said larger configurations will be available in the second half of 2016.

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