On May 20, 2011, Sandia and supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc. announced they had signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) to form an institute focused on data-intensive supercomputers.

The Supercomputing Institute for Learning and Knowledge Systems (SILKS), to be located at Sandia/New Mexico, was expected to leverage the strengths of both Sandia and Cray by making software and hardware resources available to researchers who focus on a relatively new application of supercomputing. The task of such supercomputers is to make sense of huge collections of data rather than the traditional modeling and simulation of scientific problems.