SAN FRANCISCO, May 17 (Xinhua) -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Friday announced a deal to acquire U.S. supercomputer manufacturer Cray to tap into the future exascale market.

HPE said it has entered into a definitive agreement under which it will buy the Seattle-based high-performance computing (HPC) company for 35.00 dollars per share in an all-cash transaction valued at about 1.3 billion dollars.

The merger will give HPE an opportunity to drive the next generation of HPC and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work, said President and Chief Executive Officer of HPE Antonio Neri.

HPE said the transaction is expected to close by the first quarter of its fiscal year 2020, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

The deal came only a few weeks after Cray said it would make the world's fastest supercomputer in 2021, in the wake of a 600-million-dollar contract awarded on May 7 by the U.S. Department of Energy to Cray for making a supercomputer called Frontier.

Frontier will have a performance of 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, faster than the 1.0 exaflops supercomputer Cray is developing with Intel called Aurora.

Such exascale capabilities will offer a promising prospect for the HPC sector, which will generate more than 4 billion dollars in the next five years, according to HPE's forecast.

The HPC segment of the market and associated storage and services is expected to grow from about 28 billion dollars in 2018 to approximately 35 billion dollars in 2021, an increase of 9 percent annually, said HPE.

Cray was founded in 1972 by Seymour Cray, who is called "the father of supercomputing." It offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers, high-performance storage, data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions.