In December of last year I was was pointed by a vigilant international man of mystery to a press release posted on the Norwegian Stock Exchange (yes, there are very few lengths to which we won’t go to get a story) that Rogue Wave was acquiring TotalView in a deal that closed on December 31, 2009. This followed an earlier acquisition by Rogue Wave of Visual Numerics Inc. (VNI), maker of helpful software like the IMSL libraries.
I was most curious at the time about what Rogue Wave was up to — after all, we’ve seen great technology from our community get gobbled up before only to disappear or face an uncertain future (see Google buys PeakStream and Microsoft buys Interactive Supercomputing). Despite my pestering, all I could get from the companies was a promise of an update “later.”
Later, as it turns out, was last week when the CEO of Rogue Wave, Brian Pierce, and CTO Sean FitzGerald spent some time with me to talk about who they are and what they are up to.
Rogue Wave was founded in 1989 and, after a couple acquisitions and a spin out, is once again a private company (they are owned by Battery Ventures, a venture capital/private equity firm). Headquartered in Boulder, CO, the company has three other offices in the US as well as offices in France, Germany, the UK, and Japan. Rogue Wave has 3,000 customers in 36 countries. The company started out making software for atmospheric research (+1 for having a technical computing background), and that part of the company today builds C++ components and infrastructure for highly performant applications (see this page on their web site for details).
While there are certainly application domains in HPC for which C++ is commonly used, it is certainly not the bulk of that community. It’s important to note that Rogue Wave describes HPC as both “high performance” and “highly productive”, which helps make a little more sense of their market position. Their 2009 acquisitions also helped substantially shift the center of mass of the company to a more traditionally HPC market.
First up in 2009 was Visual Numerics. Founded in 1970, Visual Numerics was one of the first ISVs to deliver cross-platform numerical libraries, and when it was acquired had over 500,000 users for its embeddable mathematical and statistical algorithms and visualization software for data-intensive applications. VNI products that were added to the Rogue Wave stable included IMSL, PV-WAVE, and PyIMSL. This acquisition allowed Rogue Wave to cover more of the very technical HPC community, and gave it an in with those on the data analysis side as well.
Then in late 2009 Rogue Wave acquired TotalView Technologies (TVT) in a move that added TVT’s very widely-used debugger to its stable of products. This acquisition puts Rogue Wave today in every part of the software management lifecycle, from creation and management through debugging and tuning, and makes them one of the largest independent (from a specific hardware platform, OS, or chip) tool vendors in our community.
So what are they going to do with that advantage?
As CTO Sean FitzGerald explained to me, the company’s engineers have a unique HPC and cross-platform skillset that allows them to build tools that enable applications to move from the desktop to a high-end super without having to re-code an application. The company’s libraries and tools include native support for C# (mostly applicable to desktop programming), Java, Fortran, C and C++, a list that pretty well covers any language you’d want to write a high performance application in from financial services to fluid mechanics.
FitzGerald says that he sees the companies next challenges primarily in dealing with the increasing hybridization of production HPC hardware as well as providing tools for managing the increasingly large streams of data users are producing and analyzing. Their vision is to build tools and components that reduce complexity and increase productivity, are cross platform, and support multiple languages. But why does an ISV need to do this? Don’t the vendors know their platforms best? “Vendor- and platform-specific tools are important,” says FitzGerald, “but they lock users into a specific way of doing things that often doesn’t translate into portable code, or portable performance. As an ISV Rogue Wave can develop tools that leverage important vendor components, like optimized BLAS, to allow users to write high performance code that they can expect to last for many years and run on many different platforms.”
Of course, one of the implications of going independent means that you may have to wait longer for a specific technology to prove that its not a flash in the pan before it gets rolled into the toolset. A case in point is GPU support. FitzGerald says they are in the process now of adding GPU support in both the TotalView debugger and IMSL libraries, with releases scheduled for later this year. If you are the kind of person that is at least as concerned with productivity and effectiveness as you are with performance (and that isn’t everyone), then waiting for a technology to prove itself is probably right up your alley. If not, you likely aren’t an “all in” Rogue Wave customer anyway.
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