SEATTLE, WA and SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 29, 2012) - YarcData, the newly-created division of Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: [ CRAY ]) dedicated to providing "Big Data" solutions for enterprise customers, today announced the launch of the YarcData uRiKA graph appliance -- a purpose-built solution for Big Data relationship analytics -- at the 2012 Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California.

The uRiKA graph appliance fills an unmet need in the rapidly-growing Big Data market. While many critical Big Data problems are based on graphs, most current Big Data solutions are based on partitioned data structures that scale out on clusters. Current Big Data approaches, including graph databases, result in low performance on graphs since graphs are hard to partition across cluster nodes, are non-deterministic, and are highly dynamic. The launch of the uRiKA solution addresses the challenge of delivering insightful analytics on graphs, not only in terms of its ability to handle size and complexity of relationships, but also in terms of its response time and speed of processing.

"Graphs are an important segment of the Big Data market with increasingly important applicability to problems in areas such as social networking, healthcare, finance, life sciences, and telecommunications," said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum Research. "Given the importance of real-time interactive analytics on graphs, it's not just about Big Data but also Fast Data."

The uRiKA graph appliance is specifically designed for a graph-based approach to Big Data analytics. By bringing together data and relationships from multiple sources, and enhancing these relationships through automated inference and deduction, the uRiKA graph appliance builds up a relationship warehouse. The system supports both real-time visualization of relationships for interactive discovery and real-time searches for relationships based on partially-specified patterns and templates.

"With the launch of the uRiKA graph appliance, YarcData now enables data scientists to quickly get to what we call the uRiKA moment -- the ability to discover unknown, unforeseen and hidden relationships in Big Data," said Arvind Parthasarathi, General Manager, YarcData. "By combining high-performance, graph optimized hardware with an industry-standard, open-source software stack, YarcData's uRiKA graph appliance enables enterprises to have a rapid time to value on their Big Data relationship analytics initiatives."

The uRiKA graph appliance is available now and is successfully deployed at multiple customer sites. Early adopters include the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB), Mayo Clinic, Noblis, Swiss CSCS and a US government organization.

Life Sciences uRiKA Customer Use Case:
"Data-intensive graph problems abound in the Life Science drug discovery and development process," said Leroy Hood, President of ISB. "uRiKA enables ISB's research efforts on the Cancer Genome Atlas by discovering unforeseen relationships across a graph of multiple types of cancers, datasets of multiple data types, such as unstructured, text, sequence, numerical, images, etc. and all of these studied by different platform technologies. uRiKA's support for open standards like Java, RDF and SPARQL makes ISB's work extensible, feasible and sustainable, reduces our analysis time and makes possible new approaches to generating disease models that are both predictive and actionable (can help patients)."

Healthcare Provider uRiKA Customer Use Case:
With the rich medical history data set of ten million patients, physicians want to identify "similar" patients to ensure consistent selection of the most effective treatment. Since each physician defines "similarity" differently for each patient based on a multitude of parameters including events, symptoms, diagnoses, diseases, treatments, prescriptions, genetics and family history, uRiKA enables real-time, interactive analytics based on physician-specified ad-hoc patterns on the entire patient relationship graph.

Features and benefits of the YarcData uRiKA graph appliance include:

• Specialized graph-optimized hardware that provides up to 512 terabytes of global shared memory, massively-multithreaded graph processors supporting 128 threads/processor, and highly scalable I/O with data ingest rates of up to 350 terabytes per hour. As a result, the uRiKA graph appliance is uniquely able to provide real-time, interactive analytics on Big Data graph problems.
• The uRiKA graph appliance wraps the graph-optimized hardware with an industry-standard, open-source software stack of SuSe Linux, Apache Tomcat/Jena/Fuseki, WS02 Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Google Gadgets. The system supports applications built on industry-standards like Java, RDF, SPARQL, web services and OSGi. With this appliance, enterprises can now leverage all their existing IT skillsets and expertise to solve Big Data graph problems, and all applications built on the uRiKA graph appliance can be run on other platforms without vendor lock-in.
• Importantly, the uRiKA graph appliance complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing enterprise analytics workflow.

About YarcData
YarcData, a division of Cray Inc., is bringing business-focused, differentiated, and cost-effective Big Data appliance solutions to the enterprise market by leveraging compelling technologies developed by Cray through working in some of the world's most data intensive environments. YarcData is based in the San Francisco bay area and more information is at [ www.yarcdata.com ].

About Cray Inc.
As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology is designed to enable scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to [ www.cray.com ] for more information.

Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and YarcData and uRiKA are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.