Bill Poduska joins Interactive Supercomputing board of directors

Dr. John William Poduska, Sr. has joined Interactive Supercomputing Inc.’s (ISC) board of directors. The former NASA engineer and entrepreneur, who helped launch everything from the Apollo Space Mission to the modern day technical workstation, brings a wealth of business experience in helping to transform ISC into a major software company. ISC’s Star-P software platform delivers interactive parallel computing power to the desktop. It enables faster prototyping and problem solving across a range of security, intelligence, manufacturing, energy, biomedical, financial and scientific research applications. Poduska, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was a founder, vice president of research and director of Prime Computer; founder, CEO and chairman of Apollo Computer and Stellar Computer; and the chairman and CEO of Stardent Computer. He was also the chairman of the Board of Advanced Visual Systems. Today, in addition to serving on the board of ISC, he serves as a member of the Board of Directors of five companies and several non-profit organizations. Poduska’s awards include the prestigious McDowell Award of the IEEE and the MIT Corporate Leadership and Distinguished Industrial Achievement Awards. He was also chosen as Arthur Young Venture Magazine’s Master Entrepreneur in High Technology, and was inducted into the Institute of Entrepreneurs. He has also been an assistant professor of electrical engineering and holds a doctorate of science degree from MIT and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Lowell University. “Interactive Supercomputing is a highly innovative company, with origins in parallel computing research from MIT and an industry proven team,” said Poduska. “ISC is changing the landscape of high performance computing with software that directly addresses the growing productivity crisis caused by the proliferation of parallel computing hardware at the chip and system level. Multi-core chips and massively parallel systems challenge the ability of domain experts in science and engineering to quickly and effectively transform their ideas into the large scale models and simulations needed to perform research and development. Interactive Supercomputing’s Star-P software hides the complexities and difficulties of the parallel programming needed for supercomputing levels of performance and as a direct result extends the benefits of high performance computing to a much larger community of scientists, engineers and analysts. I am very excited to be working with the Interactive Supercomputing team in advancing their mission of improving innovation and competitiveness.”