Cray Decides to Make “Big Data” Business Division

Cray may be one of, if not the greatest maker of supercomputers, but even it can't seem to be handling the “Big Data” market as well as it would like, hence its new business decision.

Long story short, the company has decided to create a new business division, called YarcData and led by Arvind Parthasarathi, who will become its first senior vice president and general manager.

YarcData will have to handle Cray's coverage of the so-called “Big Data” market, the playground of huge supercomputers that run massive simulations.

“YarcData is the nexus of the world's most advanced technologies from Cray being applied to solve the world's most challenging Big Data problems,” said Arvind Parthasarathi.

“The Big Data market is in its infancy and YarcData solutions will fill an important and unmet need in enterprise Big Data processing. This is a unique opportunity to deliver Cray's high performance technology to meet 21st century Big Data challenges, and I look forward to building a successful future for YarcData, Cray and our customers worldwide.”

YarcData will assist enterprises from around the world with cost-effective and specialized Big Data solutions, as they are called.

Cray employees from Cray's research and development, marketing, services, sales and support departments have come together to get it started.

“Cray is best known for building supercomputers that can run massive scientific and engineering simulations, and from that work we have developed unique technologies and amassed significant experience working with some of the largest data-intensive environments in the world,” said Peter Ungaro, president and chief executive officer of Cray.

“This makes our entry into the Big Data market a natural evolution,"

Given how strong processors have become these days, and how high the new computational capabilities of supercomputers are getting, not to mention the massive storage databases deployed worldwide, one might wonder why Cray didn't do this sooner.