BIG DATA

Alongside record 2006 sales, Concurrent Thinking Ltd, a leading provider of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and software, today announced a significant investment of £1.7M ($3.1M) from a consortium of UK investors including Oxford Capital Partners, the Forward Group, and existing investor, the Advantage Growth Fund. The funding will allow the company to scale both its cluster computing division, Streamline Computing, and its parallel tools division, Allinea Software. “Over the lifetime of the company, Concurrent has demonstrated exceptional growth while investing significantly in R&D,” said Dr Michael Rudgyard, CEO and founder. “Since its inception in 2000, Streamline Computing has become the UK’s leading HPC Cluster provider, building a profitable, high-turnover business and an impressive list of customers across Europe and the Middle East. At the same time we have built Allinea Software – a development tools business whose worldwide growth mirrors that of the burgeoning parallel and multi-core computing marketplace. The investment announced today will not only allow the company to grow its existing business units, but will also permit it to bring other internal R&D projects to market in the form of new products. We welcome the new partnership with Oxford Capital Partners and the Forward Group, as well as the continued support of existing investors such as the Advantage Growth Fund, in helping us to achieve our ambitious goals.” “The cluster computing marketplace is now approaching a turning point as customers demand a level of technical capabilities and a support infrastructure that is beyond the scope of ‘home-grown’ systems, as well as solutions that can be provided by traditional system integrators”, added Dr John Taylor, CTO of Streamline. “Until now the cluster architecture has predominantly competed on price/performance, although today’s HPC clusters require a much more ‘systematic’ approach – with closely integrated management, storage and visualization solutions – while maintaining that cost effectiveness. As the cluster architecture and HPC gain more ground in the enterprise computing space, the challenge will be to deliver and sustain business-critical capabilities while enjoying the benefits of commodity hardware. The current investment in Streamline will ensure that the company can meet all of these challenges head on.” Some of the funds will also be used to grow Allinea’s business, and in particular to maintain the rapid growth in sales of its Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) and Optimization and Profiling Tool (OPT) products. “As demonstrated by recent announcements of multi-core processors by virtually every chip manufacturer, the need for a new generation of tools for parallel computing is evident. The company’s past investment in DDT and OPT – products that are now proven in HPC, where large-scale parallelism is the norm – has positioned Allinea as a leader in the field,” said Jacques Philouze, VP of Sales and Marketing for Allinea Software. “This funding will help us to expand our sales operations and explore new markets for our products”, he added. Allinea Software will be exhibiting at Supercomputing (SC06) in Tampa, USA on November 11 -17, as well as the MultiCore Expo conferences in Tokyo from October 31 to November 1 and in Munich, Germany from November 14 – 15. “Oxford Capital Partners is delighted to support Concurrent Thinking at this stage of its growth and to have led this round of funding, which should allow the company to expand more forcefully into the international arena and develop the next generation of tools for the next generation of supercomputers.” said Dr Victor Christou, Investment Manager at Oxford Capital Partners.