Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) $1.3 billion bet on high-performance computing (HPC) appears to be paying off. The business segment alone accounted for $1 billion of the company’s $7.35 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021.

“HPE is at the center of several compelling megatrends: the explosion of data at the edge, the mandate for a cloud experience everywhere, and the need to extract value from data to generate insights,” CEO Antonio Neri said on this week’s Q4 earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

All of these trends contributed to the strength of HPE’s HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) business unit during the quarter.

“Thirty three of the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world were built by HPE. This is more than any company,” Neri boasted on the call.

HPE cemented its position as an HPC leader in early 2019, with the $1.3 billion acquisition of Cray, a company synonymous with supercomputing, and the subject of countless pop culture references, including in Michael Crichton's classic "Jurassic Park."

Founded in 1987 by Seymour Cray, the Seattle-based firm specialized in supercomputing, storage, and data analytics products.

The purchase has since helped HPE secure several high profile HPC wins, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputing cluster. The cluster is expected to deliver 1.5 exaFLOPs of computing power when it comes online early next year.

Neri also touted the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Promoter supercomputer.

While large supercomputing clusters run by well-funded scientific institutions remain a lucrative business, HPE sees an opportunity to democratize the technology. “HPE is uniquely positioned to bring the AI, deep learning, and data analytics capabilities of our most advanced supercomputers to mainstream enterprises through the HPE GreenLake platform,” Neri said.

Traditionally, HPC infrastructure has been expensive, complex to deploy, and enjoys a relatively short lifecycle compared to general-purpose server hardware, Dell’Oro Group analyst Baron Fung told SDxCentral in response to questions.

Nonetheless, there are “compelling reasons for enterprises to keep HPC on premise,” he said. “HPC-type workloads are generally mission critical, require low-latency, and are potentially sensitive.”

For customers that aren’t limited by these considerations, public-cloud-based offerings make more sense, he said, adding that HPE’s GreenLake for HPC is sort of a happy medium that allows customers to consume HPC resources in a cloud-like fashion on premises.

Introduced late last year, HPE’s GreenLake for HPC expanded the company’s consumption-based, infrastructure-as-a-service model to supercomputing.

At the time, HPE SVP and GM of GreenLake Keith White described the new offering as “supercomputing-as-a-service.”

It allows customers to consume HPC infrastructure in the same way as public cloud providers, but physically deploy those resources wherever they’re required, whether that be in the data center, a colocation facility, or at the edge.

“Both infrastructure-as-a-service and AI and HPC adoption in the enterprise are in the early stages, so there are lots of growth opportunities,” Fung said. “HPE seems to have a stronger HPC offering — with Cray — than the other vendors.”

HPC and AI revenues continued to boost HPE’s performance during the quarter, and set the company up to realize greater profits in 2022, Neri said. “This record level of demand has generated an order book of awarded contracts now at $2.7 billion, excluding the important $2 billion win from the U.S. National Security Agency.”

HPE saw modest year-over-year gains across its business units, with edge revenues up 4% to $815 million; storage up 3% to $1.3 billion; and computing and financial services up 1% to $3.2 billion and $858 million, respectively.

Annual recurring revenue again made up an increasing mix of the company’s revenue at an annual run rate of $796 million, up 36% year over year, while as-a-service orders grew 114% during the same period.

HPE ended Q4 with revenue up 2% year over year to $7.35 billion and net earnings up 1,524% to $2.55 billion during the same period.