Supercomputer provider Cray has announced the Company’s big data analytics platform – the Cray Urika-XA system – received the Best of Show award for IT Hardware and Infrastructure at the 2015 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.
The Bio-IT World Best of Show Awards Program recognises the best of the innovative product solutions for the life sciences industry on display at the Bio-IT World conference in Boston. The Best of Show program relies on a panel of expert judges from academia and industry who screen eligible new products and hear presentations on site. This year, judges considered 31 new products and viewed presentations from 13 finalists.
‘Enterprise customers from a wide range of industries, including life sciences organizations, need an analytics solution that is both cost efficient and delivers timely results from complex computing tasks,’ said Ryan Waite, Cray’s senior vice president of products.
‘Our Urika-XA system is a powerful tool for extracting valuable business insights through big data analytics. We are honored that the Bio-IT World Best of Show judges recognized the Urika-XA system as an innovative solution for life sciences research.’
Waite continued: ‘Customers in the life sciences industry have struggled to build systems that meet their unique data and computational requirements. It can be difficult to find the right balance of CPU, memory, storage, and network, and systems can suffer from the inefficiencies of commodity technologies like gigabit ethernet. With the Urika-XA, life sciences organizations can get more done faster. Our solution supports the large data requirements for life sciences workloads such as NGS and genomic analytics, eliminates wasted data movement, decreases computation time and increases the total number of jobs researchers and clinicians can complete.’
The Cray Urika-XA system is a pre-integrated, open platform for high-performance big data analytics. The platform enables organizations to gain insight and capture business value rapidly through advanced analytics, using either the pre-configured Hadoop and Spark frameworks or user-installed analytic tools.
The Urika-XA platform is engineered for superior performance on the most demanding analytic workloads, possessing a dense compute footprint of over 1,500 processor cores in a single rack and 38 TB of high-speed SSD storage. With its ability to support both low-latency and batch analytics, ease of management, and standards-based design, Urika-XA provides enterprises a multi-use, turnkey analytics environment at a low total cost of ownership.
The Cray Urika-XA system features 48 compute nodes with integrated SSDs in a single 42U rack, including Intel Xeon processors, an InfiniBand interconnect, and a Cray Sonexion storage system. The software stack for the Urika-XA system includes Cloudera Enterprise, Apache Spark and the Urika-XA management system.
