If you’re looking to establish yourself as an HPC player, you can either develop the technology yourself or purchase an established HPC company. Today, advanced memory maker Micron went with the latter course of action by acquiring Convey Computer Corp, widely known for its deep HPC roots and track record delivering hybrid-core computing.

The financial terms of the transaction are confidential, but Convey’s co-founder and CEO Bruce Toal filled in some of the high-level details on this breaking story in a conversation with HPCwire earlier today.

Toal paints a picture of a relationship formed on mutual interest in driving application performance with new memory capabilities and shared customers. Convey began working with Micron and common customers over a year ago designing accelerators that employ Micron’s Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). Although this product hasn’t been formerly launched, Convey and Micron previewed it at SC14, so it seems likely that an announcement will be forthcoming.

Toal, who is a self-proclaimed memory enthusiast, says that a lot of the synergies that are being developed can be traced to memory bandwidth. “We are passionate about memory band,” he says of himself and his crew at Convey. “Eventually it boils down to ‘can you develop enough bandwidth?’ I think we share that kind of passion for performance with our new colleagues at Micron.

“That interest is how we got connected and then things really coalesced around a number of common customers for whom these messages resonated. So it was a really natural fit from our point of view.”

Although Toal wasn’t at liberty to disclose the names of these customers, he mentions that the common realm of synergies has been seen in the spaces that Convey has traditionally served, namely the hyperscale area and government sector.

Where the companies really differ, however, is scale. Convey is a small private company of fewer than 50 employees with a main office in Richardson, Texas. Crunchbase puts their annual revenue at $10 to $20 million. Micron, an American multinational corporation based in Boise, Idaho, and one of the largest memory makers in the world, occupies the other end of the corporate spectrum. It counts 30,000 staffers in its workforce and has a market capitalization hovering around $32 billion.

Still, Toal and some of his compatriots, like Convey cofounder Steve Wallach, are not altogether unfamiliar with such a bold transition. Before Toal and Wallach founded Convey in 2007, they were executives at another HPC company, Convex Computer Corporation, which developed vector supercomputers back in the 80s and 90s – and Convex was bought by HP in 1995. Toal half-joked that Micron is not quite the giant that HP is, so perhaps it still maintains some of the spirit of a smaller business. He adds that it’s only his second day with the company.

Convey represented Wallach and Toal’s vision to bring reconfigurable computing into the mainstream of HPC. They recruited some of their former Convex team mates and Convey was born (using the formula Convex+1). Intel Capital and Xilinx were principle investors, along with CenterPoint Ventures, InterWest Partners and Rho Ventures. Four fundings rounds in total have raised $58.6 million for the company. Micron was not free to disclose whether these investors were made whole due to the confidential nature of the arrangements and mandatory “quiet period.”

We do know, however, that the Convey brand was part of what was acquired, and for now at least, there are no plans to change that branding. This fits in with the reasoning behind the purchase: providing Micron with HPC recognition and mindshare. Toal will remain as the top executive of the Convey group inside Micron, and Steve Wallach has already updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new title as Micron engineering director.

“We acquired Convey for their expertise and the history they have in this area” observes Susan Platt, Strategic Marketing Communication Manager at Micron Technology, who was also on the call. “We’re really excited about that and I’m sure that Bruce will be working at a high level in the organization.”

The rest of Convey team have also been brought aboard, but they will retain their office location in Richardson, Texas, for the foreseeable future, according to Toal. Organizationally, the Convey team will be integrated into Micron’s Advanced Computing Solutions division, a subgroup of the memory maker’s Compute and Networking Business Unit, which is led by Tom Eby, vice president of embedded solutions at Micron.

The Advanced Computing Solutions group is overseen by Stephen Pawlowski, who came to Micron in June after 31 years at Intel. Toal reflects that there is great synergy to be mined as this group shares a similar passion around delivering computing performance.

Customers and investors will, of course, want to know whether they can trust in a product roadmap going forward. The plan is for Micron to integrate the Convey product line into the Micron sales organization. It’s a product set that includes Wolverine line of PCIe Express accelerators as well as the Convey HC-2 systems aimed at the graph analytics space. Work on the OpenPOWER CAPI developer kit for Xilinx FPGAs, announced last week, will also go forward.

Toal says it will take about 90 days to transition products into the Micron sales flow. If this seems like a short time, consider that the partners have been working together for some time and Convey already has a solid product line and roadmap. Introducing it to the engineering and sales teams shouldn’t be a greenfield effort. It’s more likely that the three months will be spent putting together the required collateral and educating the sale organization. There will be details to work out aligning this roadmap with Micron strategy, but they have product in the box already that they can start selling.