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.
In the IT business, volume is everything. And when people talk about standardization, this is what they really mean. Liquid Computing – a company that entered the server space with such a big splash (and a very sophisticated design) – has learned this lesson the hard way. And with its second rev of products, the company has ditched its proprietary server interconnection scheme and adopted Ethernet.
AMD has announced that it has revised its plan to ramp-up production [and subsequent availability] of the quad-core Barcelona chips from Q4 of 2007 to Q1 of 2008. In October, they stated that Barcelona silicon would be “widely available” by the end of the year.
