HPCwire: Interactive Supercomputing -- A Startup In Transition

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

February 09, 2007

Interactive Supercomputing -- A Startup In Transition

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

After having achieved some level of success, most startup companies usually end up replacing the founding CEO with a more seasoned business executive. At Interactive Supercomputing Inc. (ISC), this transition took place on January 10th, when they swapped founder and CEO Pete Peterson with Bill Blake. Peterson will remain with the company as the executive chairman of the board.

Bill Blake has been involved with high performance computing systems for more that 20 years. Before coming to ISC, he was a senior vice president of product development for Netezza, where he lead a team that developed a terascale database appliance for real-time business intelligence, employing a parallelized version of SQL. Prior to that, Blake was vice president of high performance technical computing at Compaq, where he led development and marketing efforts of HPTC solutions, including the company's AlphaServer SC supercomputers.

The fundamental reason for this executive shuffling is to move the organization from startup company to one that is more actively pursuing growth and partnership opportunities. The company currently has over 30 customers for their Star-P software product. Star-P uses a client-server model to add parallelization to very high level language environments on the desktop (initially MATLAB) to enable applications to run on HPC servers. At this point, both SGI and HP servers are supported by the Star-P platform.

Beyond support for SGI and HP hardware, ISC would also like to partner with all the other tier one system OEMs. Since Blake is a member of the board of directors for Cray, it would safe to assume their are discussions going on there as well.

The most important extension to the Star-P platform will be the delivery of the Python client later in 2007. The company sees a lot of interest in the community for a Python front-end for technical computing. They believe adding parallelization to this language will broaden their client base substantially. Over time, Blake says they would like to support other very high-level languages such as Mathematica and R (a language for statistical computing).

Beyond 2007, there are some other ideas brewing. Since Star-P contains software hooks to connect external parallel libraries to user code, the company is looking into expanding this facility to integrate FPGA acceleration software functionality. The lack of maturity in software support for FPGAs or even more traditional co-processor accelerators is something that Blake thinks could be a real opportunity for ISC.

"This is a very interesting area now," observes Blake. "In the next year or two, there are going to be some very fascinating system configurations, that will frankly require some sort of a reasonable software platform to allow people to move from traditional SMP and cluster environments into these accelerated environments."

Some accelerator support may be done in conjunction with OEM partnerships. For example, HP's use of ClearSpeed boards in some of their deployments may be an opportunity to add support for this hardware.

While Star-P early adopters range from the Air Force Research Labs to Australia's CSIRO, they have also found a sweet spot in medical image processing. In this environment, computation is typically done on the desktop by neuroscientists using MATLAB codes applied to MRI scans. But as more advanced MRI machines are used to increase resolution and speed, computing requirements of many neuroimaging applications are outstripping desktop workstations. Since languages like Fortran and C with MPI are alien to this particular domain, Star-P provides a relatively easy way to get to HPC -- assuming the lab can get access to some SGI or HP hardware.

ISC is also attracting the attention of Wall Street. Blake says they have one financial firm who has already bought the platform, although he could not disclose the company's name. Like other data- and compute-intensive workloads, financial applications are increasingly looking to HPC to get better performance and real-time turnaround. Derivative pricing applications, in particular, are being pushed beyond the limits of conventional spreadsheets and finance application tools.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html