Today my buddy Chris sent me an email pointing to news that Microsoft has bought the technologies behind Interactive Supercomputing. Today the Interactive Supercomputing site redirects to a Microsoft.com site that’s meant to steer users during the transition.
Kyril Faenov, General Manager of High Performance & Parallel Computing Technologies at MS, has a blog post on the Windows Server Division blog about the acquisition (remember the days when companies actually issued press releases when they did something instead of blog posts?)
Today, I’m very excited to announce that Microsoft has acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), a company that specializes in bringing the power of parallel computing to the desktop and making high performance computing more accessible to end users. This move represents our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high performance computing (HPC) and will bring together complementary technologies that will help simplify the complexity and difficulty of expressing problems that can be parallelized. ISC’s products and technology enable faster prototyping, iteration, and deployment of large-scale parallel solutions, which is well aligned with our vision of making high performance computing and parallel computing easier, both on the desktop and in the cluster.
Bill Blake, CEO of ISC, is bringing over a team of industry leading experts on parallel and high performance computing that will join the Microsoft team at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA. He and I are both excited to start working together on the next generation of technology for researchers, analysts, and engineers, as well as those who have yet to be exposed to the benefits of parallel computing and HPC technologies or may have thought they were out of reach.
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.
Congratulations to Bill and the Interactive Supercomputing team. I believe that this is a move that makes sense from the perspective of getting Interactive’s technology out to a much broader audience, and I believe it has the potential to substantially enhance Microsoft’s ability to produce parallel and HPC technologies that will work for a much broader audience than the traditional HPC crowd. This has always been the potential of Microsoft’s involvement in HPC, and I hope this helps them achieve it.
I’m going to tag Interactive Supercomputing into the deadpool with this post as well, and I went back and put RapidMind (acquired by Intel) into the pool. I think that makes sense — they didn’t technically die, but they are no more. What do you think, though? Should I only dip companies into the pool if they go out of business?
I just wonder if this will be like Google and PeakStream.
Chris – I hope not, and my hope is based on the difference that Google wanted PeakStream so that its developers could develop Google products faster and more reliably. In other words, an internal use case for improved development of end services presented to internet users. Users only see the end result (faster image search, or whatever), but not the PeakStream technology itself.
Microsoft is in the (parallel) computing business, and produces tools for application developers and end users designed to make the process of parallel computing more manageable. Its easy to envision them axing the Star-P brand, but plugging the same technologies into applications and tools that still face users — ie, a Matlab-like interface to its cloud computing solution, or whatever. So the technologies themselves wouldn’t disappear from the community in the same way that PeakStream’s technologies did.
That’s my hope, anyway.