In my prior two posts about analytics, I highlighted the vast opportunity available in big data and the obstacles that prevent organizations from attaining tangible benefits:
- Complexity across fronts
- An onslaught of analytics tools
- The difficulty retaining the right skillsets
- Slowdowns in getting to insights and decisions
But these hurdles can be overcome. For innovative businesses grappling with the realities of big data, an agile analytics environment provides the best of all approaches. Such a platform enables you to seize your big data advantage with a potent combination of system agility and the pervasive speed needed to deliver high-frequency insights.
To address this need, Cray has fused supercomputing technology with an open, standards-based framework to deliver the Cray® Urika®-GX platform. This advanced hardware-software solution has an unprecedented combination of versatility and speed to tackle your largest problems at super scale and uncover hidden patterns with a faster time to insight.
With the Urika-GX system, you can run both multiple analytics workloads (including Spark™, Hadoop® and graph), and – for the first time in the industry – high performance computing concurrently. Plus, the dynamic repurposing of analytics resources using Mesos™ orchestration increases infrastructure utilization, reduces data silos and empowers your data scientists to be more productive.
The open framework, with support for tools like OpenStack®, Kafka and Docker, enables customization and extends the value for future analytics tools. For easier adoption and operation, the Urika-GX system is based on pre-integrated, industry-standard software with intuitive management. And the standard datacenter format has three configurations (small-medium-large) that are extensible to multiple racks so you can grow the system as your needs do.
Now, if we consider speed, it’s just no longer a single benchmark number. The Urika-GX system takes a systemic, architectural approach to speed and parallelization that leverages decades of expertise in supercomputing. We offer the sheer horsepower of up to 1,728 cores per node on up to 48 nodes with a combination of 35 to 176 TB of PCIe SSD on-node memory and up to 22 TB of DRAM – not to mention the Cray Aries™ interconnect, which benefits large-scale, memory-intensive workloads. This means you can achieve blazing-fast results regardless of how large your big data needs become.
What’s more, speed today also means being ready when your business needs you to be. The Urika-GX platform eliminates lengthy implementation work with the convenience of a pre-integrated, preconfigured and tested system that is ready for data in days – not months. And because finding hidden meaning in big data is becoming so essential, we’ve integrated the Cray Graph Engine and pre-tuned it to leverage the system’s serious parallelization and performance. The result is graph analytics that find relationships faster than anything tested at high scale.
The Cray Urika-GX platform provides businesses a way to achieve high-frequency insights from basic analysis and streaming analytics to machine learning. You can now move beyond limitations to uncover new opportunities faster, tackle your biggest challenges and have the freedom to evolve for whatever comes next.
So let’s work together on transforming your toughest obstacles into your biggest opportunities. And that’s really the point, right? We know you can do amazing things, and we know we can help get you there because it’s what we’ve always done. So my last quote from The Big Lebowski is, appropriately, “The Dude Abides.”
To learn more about the Cray Urika-GX platform, Cray Graph Engine and Cray’s innovation in analytics, visit www.cray.com/analytics .
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