Cray

HPE Cray Supercomputing

HPE Cray Supercomputing offers significant sustainability benefits by combining high-density architecture with advanced thermal management. A key feature is the use of direct liquid cooling (DLC), which is up to 100 times more efficient at heat transfer than air. By eliminating energy-intensive server fans, DLC can reduce total energy consumption by approximately 10% and cooling-specific power by up to 37%. Furthermore, the warm water generated by these systems can be repurposed for waste heat recovery to heat surrounding buildings or greenhouses, potentially offsetting the facility’s overall carbon footprint.

Beyond operational efficiency, HPE Cray systems help reduce the environmental impact of physical infrastructure. The high-density design can halve the required data center floor space, lowering the embodied carbon associated with building construction. Organizations can also leverage the HPE Sustainability Insight Center for real-time monitoring of energy use and carbon emissions, while HPE Asset Upcycling Services ensure that retired hardware is refurbished or recycled, supporting a circular economy and keeping materials out of landfills.

HPE Cray supercomputers feature a specialized software stack centered on the HPE Cray Operating System, a hardened version of SUSE® Linux® designed for exascale performance and extreme stability. This is paired with the HPE Cray System Management suite, which provides the necessary automation to provision, monitor, and maintain thousands of nodes and high-speed interconnects through a unified, cloud-native management framework.

For developers, the platform includes the HPE Cray Programming Environment (CPE), a comprehensive suite of optimized compilers, scientific libraries, and performance analysis tools for C, C++, and Fortran. It supports seamless scaling for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads by integrating industry-standard workload managers like Slurm or PBS Professional alongside high-performance communication libraries like MPI, ensuring maximum efficiency across both CPUs and GPU accelerators.

For large-scale installations like the HPE Cray EX, HPE Complete Care offers a personalized, modular service with an assigned account team that manages the entire infrastructure for maximum system uptime. For a seamless deployment, HPE provides a HPE Cray Supercomputer Startup Service, which assigns a dedicated HPC Installation Project Manager to oversee the implementation process. This service includes pre-installation verification and onsite expert support to correctly architect everything from liquid-cooling manifolds to high-speed interconnects.

To get started with an HPE Cray supercomputer deployment, organizations must first complete site preparation, ensuring the facility can support the required power loads, cooling requirements, and floor-weight capacities. This process is guided by the HPE Cray Supercomputer Startup Service, which assigns a dedicated HPC Installation Project Manager to oversee the transition from factory integration to onsite setup. This service delivery manager coordinates the physical installation, including uncrating, rack positioning, and power-on verification, so all environmental prerequisites are met before the hardware arrives.

Once the physical infrastructure is in place, the deployment shifts to initializing the HPE Cray System Management (CSM) framework and the HPE Cray Programming Environment (CPE). Administrators use tools like the Install and Upgrade Framework (IUF) to configure the operating system, set up optimized compilers and libraries, and integrate workload managers such as Slurm or PBS Professional. This structured approach provides the high-speed interconnects and management services are fully tuned and ready for production-level HPC and AI workloads.

The name Cray refers to Seymour Cray, a visionary electrical engineer often called the "father of supercomputing." After pioneering early high-speed systems at CDC, he founded Cray Research in 1972. His designs, most notably the iconic C-shaped Cray-1, set the global standard for processing power and established the brand as the premier name in the industry for decades.

Today, the name is a brand of supercomputing solutions under Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which acquired Cray Inc. in 2019. The brand continues to represent the cutting edge of technology, powering the world’s first exascale supercomputers used for complex scientific research, weather forecasting, and national security.

• El Capitan: Currently the #1 supercomputer in the world, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It reached a performance record of 1.809 exaflops in late 2025 and is the first system to lead both the TOP500 and the HPCG performance rankings simultaneously.
• Frontier: The world's first verified exascale system, currently ranked #2 globally. It is hosted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and delivers 1.353 exaflops of performance while remaining one of the greenest systems in the industry.
• Aurora: Ranked #3 in the world, this exascale system at Argonne National Laboratory was built using HPE Cray EX Intel Exascale Compute Blades and has achieved 1.012 exaflops.
• LUMI: Located in Finland, LUMI is one of the world's most powerful and energy-efficient "AI Factories." It is an HPE Cray EX system that serves as a major hub for European research and innovation.

The primary advantage of HPE Cray is its purpose-built architecture, specifically designed to eliminate the bottlenecks found in standard clusters. While many competitors rely on general-purpose networking, HPE Cray features the Slingshot interconnect, which provides high-speed, congestion-controlled data movement. This allows thousands of processors to work together as a single, unified machine without slowing down, making it the superior choice for massive AI model training and complex scientific simulations that outgrow traditional hardware.

Furthermore, HPE Cray systems lead the industry in energy efficiency and density through advanced direct liquid cooling. By cooling every component with liquid rather than fans, these systems reduce power consumption and floor space requirements while supporting the highest-performance CPUs and GPUs. This exascale-ready engineering is the same technology powering the world's fastest supercomputers, offering a proven, reliable environment for organizations tackling the most data-intensive challenges.

Off-the-shelf servers are designed for general-purpose tasks, which creates performance hurdles when scaled to handle the world's most complex problems. As workloads move toward exascale computing and massive AI model training, standard hardware struggles with data movement bottlenecks—where processors sit idle because the network cannot feed them information fast enough. HPE's ongoing innovation such as the Slingshot interconnect, is essential because it eliminates these communication barriers, allowing thousands of nodes to function as a single, unified machine that can solve unsolvable problems in hours rather than decades.

Furthermore, innovation is critical for sustainability and density as computing demands grow. Traditional air-cooled servers require massive amounts of energy for room-sized refrigeration, which is increasingly inefficient for high-performance chips that generate extreme heat. By pioneering direct liquid cooling technology—which is up to 100 times more efficient than air—HPE enables higher compute density and significantly lower energy consumption. This specialized engineering allows organizations to achieve breakthroughs in fields like drug discovery and climate modeling that would be financially and environmentally impossible using standard, general-purpose server clusters.