The Register has an article, Cray gets graphic with big data, on Cray’s uRiKA computer that is designed for analyzing large graphs. The specialized machine uses Crays’s Threadstorm processors and is designed to support up to 8,192 processors and 512TB of shared main memory. If you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can’t afford it — starter rack costs “several hundreds of thousands of dollars”.

Cray is positioning uRiKA as a graph appliance that “complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing enterprise analytics workflow.” Most interesting to me is that it ships ships with a software suite based on open source Semantic Web technology.

“The hardware, while impressive, is not particularly useful without some software. The Urika stack is based on the Apache Jena project, which is a Java framework for building semantic web applications. SPARQL is the pattern-matching query language for graph applications, and Apache Fuseki is the SPARQL server that runs in conjunction with the Jena framework and that allows data stored in the RDF format, the special format for graph data, to be served up over the HTTP protocol.”