Traditionally, they compete with the behemoth IBM on supercomputers. If you follow the press releases, it seems like every year either Cray or IBM can beat the other in handling massive computational tasks.

In February of 2012 the Cray Company started a division called YarcData. This division takes lessons from high speed computing and applies it to the world of big data. They have an appliance called uRIKA that holds 512 terabytes of data.

Because this can sit on a network and look like another server, it allows agencies to process massive amounts of information without going outside its security perimeter.

This week on "Federal Tech Talk", Tim White, global head for Government and Intelligence at YarcData, discusses how managing large amounts of unstructured data can apply to areas as diverse as healthcareIT and genome sequencing.