The first half of the previous decade brought about quite a series of HPC startups. With the advent of widely accepted, commodity HPC; startups popped up across the industry with offerings in tightly coupled cluster platforms and a score of software offerings. One such startup, Liquid Computing, latest longer than most, but will soon close its doors.
According to an article in the Ottawa Citizen, the Canadian platform vendor was recently unable to find additional funding to further development and operations. Last week, 20 of the Ottawa-based employees were laid off. Chief exec, hired only 14 months ago to bring the company back around, has also left.
We thought we were in position for a new round of funding but two of our three major investors were unable to contribute,” Liquid chairman Adam Chowaniec said Thursday.
We have no alternative, but to start winding down the company to preserve as much of the intellectual property as possible.”
Founded back in 2003 by former telecom engineers, Liquid raised a total of ~$50million US in order to develop their “unified computing” platform. The platform stood as one of the first unified compute and networking platforms with an integrated software stack but failed to gain much traction in HPC.
After going through a rough spot roughly eighteen months ago, the company refocused their efforts and energy on traditional data center markets. Unfortunately, this meant direct competition from IBM, HP, Dell and the new Cisco unified computing solution.
The company and its investors tried to find additional streams of funding, but it just didn’t work out in time.
Pat DiPietro, a Liquid director and partner with VG Partners, formerly VenGrowth, said backers “are trying to assemble a package to keep the company going but there is just no capital anywhere.”
Liquid, as with many startups, had a real issue with identifying their core markets and core competencies. HPC, as a whole, is niche. Generally speaking, its a tough market to break into with a very fickle set of customers. I hope the employees of Liquid have success in finding fruitful employment soon.
For more info on Liquid’s entrance into the HPC Dead Pool, read the full article here.
During SC09 a well-connected friend told me that Verari Systems was in trouble for lack of access to capital — essentially the same immediate cause as SiCortex. Then in response to my post a couple weeks ago asking if anyone had seen Verari at SC09, I got a tip that they had registered for booth space but never showed up. I really don’t like posting speculation about going out of business, since a good rumor like that can actually make itself come true. So I waited.
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.
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.
The newest multicore development tool acquisition is at least starting differently. A reader pointed us to a 
This time we’re dunking 10 GbE datacenter switch vendor Woven Systems. They had an interesting technology that had the potential to make 10 GbE networks practical for large compute clusters, and performance results that showed for some types of communications patterns their networks would dramatically outperform IB (largely because they support adaptive routing).
Word on the street is that SiCortex will announce soon, perhaps today, that they are going out of business. No word on what the problem is; I know that they were working on another round of financing, and this is a tough environment to be looking for addititional financing. I’ll try to contact the company and find out for sure.
From way out in left field comes a press release this morning jointly from Rackable and Silicon Graphics. According to the press release, Rackable has agreed to acquire “substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. for approximately $25 million in cash.” The agreement includes Silicon Graphics filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to reduce their overall debt load. 
Ladies and gentlemen, John West was 
Lots of interesting gossip and rumors floating around these days about Linux Networx and something big in the air for them this week.
