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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 09/10/07 issue

Pete Ungaro | Cray gets its groove back

GCN Interview with Pete Ungaro, Cray chief executive officer

By Rutrell Yasin

Peter Ungaro, chief executive officer at Cray, has been on a mission to help the company regain its focus since he took the helm of the supercomputer maker two years ago. Cray led the supercomputer revolution back in the 1970s and 1980s but faltered in the mid-1990s as it ran into financial trouble and faced stiff competition from server providers, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. IBM built six of the 10 fastest computers on the Top 500 Supercomputers list released in June; two were Cray machines. Ungaro spoke recently about Cray’s strategy in the high-performance computing arena and the coming wave of adaptive supercomputing.

GCN: Why did Cray lose its luster, and how did it get it back?

Ungaro: Cray, all through the ’80s and into the early ’90s, was the name in supercomputing. The company went through a number of financial challenges and actually ended up getting acquired by Silicon Graphics and then acquired out of Silicon Graphics around 2000. The main thing the company struggled with has been focus. One of the things the company has done from time to time is spread out very broadly in the marketplace and lose its focus in high-end supercomputing. The thing we worked on a lot is refocusing the company at the high end and building a cost structure for the company and a business model for the overall company where it could be successful in leading in the high end of the supercomputer world.

GCN: How is that effort going?

Ungaro: It is going pretty good. Over the next year, we’re going to roll out three brand-new products into the marketplace, all focused at the high end of the market. We really focus on systems that are about $1 million and up in price. I think the vendors that do [symmetric multiprocessing] systems did a great job of scaling the systems up [from] 10 to 100 processors. And there are a number of companies building commodity-based clusters. I think that was great to get to the next order of magnitude in scaling, maybe from about 100 processors to 1,000 processors.

Cray is really focused on getting past 1,000 processors, where innovation really matters. And Cray has a lot of technology and expertise in this market to really innovate to solve the problems of scaling up these very large systems. So we’ve been doing that not just with our mainline system, which we call the XT4 today, but we also plan to bring some other processing technology to market to expand that at the very high end.

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