PLEASANTON, CA and SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 5, 2012) - At the 2012 Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco, YarcData Inc., a Cray company (NASDAQ: [ CRAY ]), today announced the planned launch of a "Big Data" contest featuring $100,000 in prizes. The YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge will recognize the best submissions for solutions of un-partitionable, Big Data graph problems.

YarcData is holding the contest to showcase the increasing applicability and adoption of graph analytics in solving Big Data problems. The contest is also intended to promote the use and development of RDF and SPARQL (both standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium) as the industry standard for graph analytics.

"Graph databases have a significant role to play in analytic environments, and they can solve problems like relationship discovery that other traditional technologies do not handle easily," said Philip Howard, Research Director, Bloor Research. "YarcData driving thought leadership in this area will be positive for the overall graph database market, and this contest could help expand the use of RDF and SPARQL as valuable tools for solving Big Data problems."

The grand prize for the first place winner is $70,000. The second place winner will receive $10,000 and the third place winner will receive $5,000. There will also be additional prizes for the other finalists. Contest judges, which will include a combination of Big Data industry analysts, experts from academia and semantic web, and YarcData customers, will review the submissions and select the ten best contestants.

The YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge will officially begin on Tuesday, June 26, 2012 and winners will be announced during a live web event on Dec. 4, 2012. Full contest details including specific criteria and the contest judges will be announced on June 26. To pre-register for a contest information packet, please visit the YarcData website at [ www.yarcdata.com ]. Information packets will be sent out June 26. The contest will be open only to those individuals who are eligible to participate under U.S. and other applicable laws and regulations.

"As YarcData has been growing its customer base, we are seeing increased awareness and interest in graph analytics among enterprises across verticals, including life sciences, healthcare, financial services, scientific research and government," said Arvind Parthasarathi, President, YarcData. "Many critical Big Data problems are based on un-partitionable graphs and we hope this contest will encourage programmers to explore innovative solutions in the world of graph analytics. We believe RDF/SPARQL will be to graph analytics what SQL is to relational databases."

About the uRiKA Graph Analytics Appliance
YarcData's uRiKA system is a Big Data appliance for graph analytics. uRiKA helps enterprises reveal unknown, unexpected or hidden relationships in Big Data by creating a highly-scalable, real-time graph analytics warehouse that supports ad hoc queries, pattern-based searches, inferencing and deduction. The uRiKA system is a purpose-built appliance for graph analytics featuring 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 -- and an RDF/SPARQL database optimized for the underlying hardware enabling applications to interact with the appliance using industry standard interfaces. uRiKA complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing analytics workflow. Subscription pricing for on-premise deployment of the appliance eases the adoption of the uRiKA system into existing IT environments.

About YarcData Inc.
YarcData delivers business-focused real-time graph analytics for enterprises to gain business insight by discovering unknown relationships in Big Data. Adopters include the Institute of Systems Biology, the Mayo Clinic, Noblis, Sandia National Labs, the Canadian government, as well as multiple deployments in the United States government. Started as a division of Cray Inc., the YarcData business is in the process of transitioning to a subsidiary, YarcData Inc., a Cray company. 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.

About RDF/SPARQL
RDF/SPARQL are standards developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and more information can be found at [ http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/query ] and [ http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ].

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.