From the Editor | Main Blog Index
September 22, 2009
Microsoft announced today that it has acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), makers of the Star-P parallel programming suite. The revelation was made via a blog post by Kyril Faenov, GM of the High Performance & Parallel Computing Technologies group at Microsoft. Faenov said ISC CEO Bill Blake and some number of ISC employees would be joining Microsoft at the company's New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, Mass. As far as plans for the Star-P product, he had this to say:
We have recently begun plans to integrate ISC technologies into future versions of Microsoft products and will provide more information over the coming months on where and how that integration will occur. Beginning immediately, Microsoft will provide support for ISC's current Star-P customers and we are committed to continually listening to customer needs as we develop the next generation of HPC and parallel computing technologies. I'm looking forward to the opportunities our two combined groups have to greatly improve the capability, performance, and accessibility of parallel computing and HPC technologies.
No terms of the acquisition were forthcoming.
UPDATE: According to the FAQ on the new ISC Web site, Microsoft will not be picking up the Interactive Supercomputing customer contracts (only support for a limited time). Microsoft will also halt all sales and future work on Star-P:
Effective with the closing date of this acquisition, Star P is no longer available to purchase. There will not be any future releases of Star P beyond the version 2.8 which was released by ISC earlier this year. The version 2.9 that was released to a few customers in Beta will not be released for production use by customers. Active Star P customers who are using earlier versions of Star P were granted the right to upgrade to 2.8 by ISC prior to the close of the transaction.
There will not be any future releases of Star P beyond the version 2.8 which was released by ISC earlier this year.
In essence, Microsoft has shut down the Star-P product line and looks to be only interested in the underlying technology and the people who developed it.
Posted by Michael Feldman - September 22, 2009 @ 10:48 AM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.