insideHPC » Deadpool

Liquid Computing Dries Up

John Leidel — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:38:05 +0000

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.

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InsideTrack: Verari Systems out of business [UPDATED]

John West — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:56:33 +0000

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 I’m hearing that Verari is locking (or has locked) the doors. First, VerariGuy has this Twitter stream over the past 22 hours

These execs should be arrested
about 4 hours ago from web

Conference call at 9am PST to let everyone know we’re done. If I knew I wasn’t talking to myself I’d have half a mind to post the phone #
about 6 hours ago from web

Well everyone, #Verari Systems is now dead. The doors are locked, and people have taken out anything not nailed down
about 22 hours ago from web

Then on my blog just a few minutes ago, a comment on the SC09 post left by reader “foo”

Verari is out of business s of today at 5:00 pm cst!

Also I’ve tried contacting folks I knew at the company with no success. No one is in their offices, and the corporate headquarters in San Diego was routed to a phone message that says I’ve called outside “normal business hours” when I tried to call at 1:00 pm Pacific. That’s enough evidence for me to put them in the deadpool, at least tentatively. If you have more info, leave a comment. Meanwhile I’m continuing to try to contact the company.

[UPDATES]

1. VerariAlumni.com also indicates that the company is out of business

Since Verari is no longer around, I’ll be using this area to communicate anything I believe my peers may need to know about, or may find of interest. This section will be built out more and more as time progresses. Of all the pages on this site, this will be the one updated most often so check back in.

2. Subsequent calls to the company by a friend did raise a person who said “I have nothing to say.” Which isn’t a denial.

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Microsoft buys Star-P maker Interactive Supercomputing

John West — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:44:15 +0000

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?

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RapidMind acquired by Intel, likely good news for the community

John West — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:00:40 +0000

Remember way back when PeakStream was acquired by Google? That acquisition was characterized by total silence, and then PeakStream disappeared into the Googleplex to become a competitive advantage for Google’s own code development effort.

The newest multicore development tool acquisition is at least starting differently. A reader pointed us to a blog post and thence to RapidMind’s web site today where we find this

We are now part of Intel Corporation, the leader in software development tools for software parallelism and performance. This change is a great development for our customers and for easing the effort in parallel programming. With Intel, our shared vision for enabling parallelism will lead to strengthening our software developer tools for multicore and manycore processors and accelerators. Later this year, we will provide more details about the integration of the RapidMind platform and Intel software products and technologies, including the Intel Ct technology for data parallelism.

We continue to sell the RapidMind platform and we encourage you to contact us to explore your interest in solutions for software parallelism. We respect and strive to preserve and expand the investments our customers have made in our products. You are encouraged to visit the Intel Developer Forum in September 2009 to hear more about Intel software developer tools.

And James Reinders, Intel’s software acquisition bullhorn (he announced the Cilk Arts buy a couple weeks ago too), has this to say on Intel’s software blog

Data Parallelism need not seem like parallelism when writing software. The advantages in avoiding “feeling like you have to learn, or deal with, parallelism” are substantial. Imagine programming, feeling familiar and intuitive, which is scalable for more and more processor cores and has safety by default (safety from data races and deadlock). That’s been our vision for our product using Intel Ct technology. Now we’ve joined up with Rapidmind, people who share our vision.

…We’ve been talking with customers, who are using Rapidmind products, about our plans together and the feedback has been very positive. We have exciting things in store for the future. Our product plans for Intel Ct technology are on track for beta before the end of the year, and the integration with Rapidmind products will come in phases after the first beta is available. This will enable us to offer the best solution our joint team can create.

James also confirms that Intel will continue to sell and support RapidMind as a separate product. So, unlike the very bad omen I felt the PeakStream acquisition was for the community, I think Intel’s move here is on balance positive, and will likely result in more resources and a bigger platform being given to this technology. Congrats to the RapidMind team, by the way.

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Intel now has Cilk inside

John West — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:02:57 +0000

The engineers responsible for the goodness in Cilk++ are packing up and moving in at Intel. From a blog post at Intel

Cilk technology will complement other methods we have had great success with – including OpenMP and Intel Threading Building Blocks. We see great opportunities for Cilk to integrate with our parallel tools very well including Intel Parallel Studio.

Cilk technology offers parallel extensions that are tightly tied into a compiler. This has pluses and minuses when compared with compiler independent methods likes Intel Threading Building Blocks which is also inspired by the original Cilk research at MIT. Having both is better than either alone, and both will have strong followings. OpenMP and our Ct technology offer even more opportunities.

And from Cilk’s website

Cilk++ has moved to Intel Corporation! This will allow us to go even further in helping make parallel programming easier. We are very excited about the synergies between Intel’s leading tools for parallel programming and the technology of Cilk++. We will have more details later this year about products from Intel that will include Cilk technology. We encourage everyone to visit us at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2009.

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InsideTrack: Former employees confirm Quadrics officially out of business last week

John West — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:23:20 +0000

In late May we reported on rumors at The Reg and the New York Times (here) that interconnect maker Quadrics was heading for a shutdown of operations in June. Subsequent Googling turned up a big fat zero, except that the rumors hadn’t yet been confirmed.

I started sending some emails around, and heard back from former Quadrics employees, who confirmed that four Quadrics staff transferred to Vega Ltd., another company owned by the parent of Quadrics, Finmeccanica UK. Vega acquired Quadrics’ outstanding support contracts, including the flagship Tera10 at CEA in France, and they also got the remaining Quadrics hardware stock to supply spares for existing customers. There is also some word that Vega has acquired some of the Quadrics IP, but no clear indication yet on what will happen to that.

I was also told that last monday (Jun 29) was the last day that the Quadrics office was open and through which people were paid.

Evidently the company was very close to coming to market with its QsNet III when things shut down. Here is the narrative as it was related to me

QsNet II, its predecessor came onto the general market in early 2004. The last significant QsNet II system was installed in Oct 2008 at British Aerospace in the UK, having beaten off 2 other vendors who offered Infiniband solutions — the Quadrics based solution won hands down on the customers own benchmarks.

Quadrics has been working on QsNet III since the design work on QsNet II was finished in 2003. Quadrics taped out the new chips in late 2008, and got as far as demonstrating sending messages from one node to another via several QsNet III switches before the plug was pulled (no pun intended) in April 2009. QsNet III had 25 Gbit/s in each direction per link. Each PCIe card had dual links, such that the theoretical peak comfortably surpassed QDR IB. The Elan5 ASIC that formed the basis of QsNet III had an incredible seven cpu cores, each a 500 MHz dual issue RISC with 8 loads and 8 DMAs pending, and 4 outstanding DMA writes. Each had a 16 Kbyte instruction cache and a 9 Kbyte DMA buffer (see paper here).

All this complexity made the Elan5 a very powerful communications processor indeed. However this complexity, coupled with the budget constraints put on the staffing the design team led to the project seriously overrunning. As recently as 2006, Quadrics were showing a roadmap (slide 9) that had the Elan5 being ready in early 2007. Another blow to Quadrics was when a group of the core design team left to form a new company at the end of 2007. During the course of 2008, several other Quadrics staff left to join them. One of the final nails in the coffin was when the last of the original founders of Quadrics, Duncan Roweth, left in early 2009 after 13 years with the company. He is now a principal engineer at Cray.

Quadrics, 1996-2009, now officially and firmly in the deadpool.

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Network vendor Woven Systems out of business

John West — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:18:15 +0000

Looks like I get to use my new deadpool category one more time this week.

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).

A commenter on my original deadpool post said that I should include them, which caught me by surprise. I did find one piece of corroborating data in this post and comments, but nothing else, and one likes to be sure before publishing an obituary. This evening I confirmed with sources connected to the company that they did indeed shut down operations on May 22, evidently after running out of cash and failing to secure additional funding.

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Inside Track: SiCortex rumored to be closing its doors [CONFIRMED]

John West — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:46:26 +0000

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.

[UPDATE]: SiCortex has begun contacting people today letting them know that the third round of financing did not materialize in time for SiCortex to continue financing. Without the cash to operate they are trying now to sell the company, with a target sale by the end of June. As of today the company has suspended all sales activity.

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Quadrics prepares to shut its doors

John West — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:04:24 +0000

Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register is reporting that interconnect maker Quadrics is getting ready to shut down operations as early as June.

This source says that Roweth has been shopping Quadrics around to Hewlett-Packard, Bull, Cray, and Silicon Graphics since last fall, and all of them apparently were not interested in acquiring the company for its QSNet-III variant on 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches. Many of the key engineers at Quadrics had subsequently left to go work for startups, the source said, and he expected Quadrics to be shut down by the end of June.

Another source said that Finmeccanica UK, Quadrics’ parent company, was going through the legal consultation process of making people redundant and that this process would be wrapped up by the end of May. He added that Roweth deserved credit for keeping Quadrics alive for as long as he did, given the harsh economic environment.

In both cases, the sources say that key employees were being moved to another Finmeccanica division to provide ongoing support for the QSNet switches and related technologies used in production supercomputers.

As pointed out in the article, the shut down has been confirmed by Finmeccanica

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Rackable Systems to Acquire Silicon Graphics

John Leidel — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:47:59 +0000

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.

The combined company will be positioned to solve the most demanding business and technology challenges our customers confront today,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of Rackable Systems. “In addition, this combination gives us the potential for significant operational synergies, a strong balance sheet, and positions the combined company for long-term growth and profitability.”

“We have been working very hard to strengthen our company, and today, we’ve taken another big step in that direction,” stated Robert “Bo” Ewald, CEO of Silicon Graphics. “This transaction represents a compelling opportunity for Silicon Graphics’ customers, partners and employees, who can all benefit from the emerging stronger company with better technologies, products and markets reach.”

Barrenechea added, “Together, we believe we will be a much stronger entity with great products and people offering a compelling proposition to compete more effectively in, and across, our collective markets.”

Rackable has since suspended its previously announced stock repurchase program. Read the full releases notices as follows:

Silicon Graphics Press Release

Rackable Systems Press Release

Silicon Graphics SEC filing

[UPDATED] Rackable SEC filing

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SGI Acquires Linux Networx Assets

John Leidel — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:21:54 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, John West was right and the ball has officially dropped. SGI has just announced that it has acquired the core assets of Linux Networx. The acquisition of patents, LNXI software, expertise and technology came in exchange for the issuance of SGI common stock. Alongside the deal is an investment into SGI by Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.

This is another significant step in the growth of SGI,” said Bo Ewald, SGI Chief Executive Officer. “We’ve grown orders more than 30 percent in each of the last two quarters. We’re in a position to acquire key technology and expertise to further power our growth. This represents the first of such key technology acquisitions and will help further the development of our software environment and support for our clustered systems. In addition, we are very pleased that Oak and Lehman Brothers have provided additional financing to the company to help speed our growth.”

Several key patents in the way of cluster design and cooling were acquired. These patents will prove integral to SGI’s success in their Altix XE and Altix ICE product lines.

Read the full article here.

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InsideTrack: LNXI entering the dead pool?

John West — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:40:51 +0000

Lots of interesting gossip and rumors floating around these days about Linux Networx and something big in the air for them this week.

I’ve been pumping my friends and irritating those I don’t know very well for the past 24 hours trying to find a quorum opinion on exactly what, and so far I don’t have one.

What I have found is reflected in a comment on this post left by an insideHPC reader on the web site today:

This week, they are going through some BIG changes, sell off/Merger or even a Complete shutdown [capitalization courtesy of the commenter]

I hear the same things. On the sale I hear that possible buyers include one of the “smaller” HPC companies, outfits like Rackable or Penguin.

I feel obligated to remind you at this point in the post that I have a terrible record with rumors. But then, so does everyone else.

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