Thursday, March 1, 2012

Cray Launches Big Data Appliance

Seattle-based Cray, the supercomputer manufacturer, said yesterday that it has launched a new Big Data appliance via its YarcData division. The firm said the new appliance is purpose built for Big Data relationship analytics, and specifically for graph databases. Graph databases are used in "Big Data" applications to store the relationships between different data elements, something which is frequently used to process relationships between nodes in a database. In the business world, these include social networking connections; they are also common in finance, healthcare, life sciences, and telecommunications.

Cray said that one use case is the comparison of medical history of tens of millions of patients, to match up the similarity of those patients based on symptoms, diseases, diagnoses, and more. Cray explained that those relationship graphs are difficult to deal with on cluster nodes. The company's uRiKA graph appliance is already being used at multiple customers, including the the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB), Mayo Clinic, Noblis, Swiss CSCS and a US government organization.

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