Massively Parallel Technologies (MPT), a provider of on-demand high-performance computing, announced that the United States Patent Office has awarded MPT its first patent, number 6,857,004, which covers the HOWARD Cascade and its implementation via Virtual Power Centers. The HOWARD Cascade is a parallel processing connectivity model that maximizes the efficient use of inter-nodal communications rather than using faster and more expensive point-to-point channel speeds. The key benefit of the HOWARD Cascade’s approach to inter-nodal communications is the vastly improved time to answer for scatter/gather communication using standard off-the-shelf components. "We continue to expand our intellectual property position and establish MPT as an innovator in the field of parallel processing," noted Scott Smith, chief executive officer of Massively Parallel Technologies. "Efficiencies and speedups realized with the HOWARD Cascade enable existing infrastructures to deliver more answers per hour thereby reducing cost per answer." The HOWARD Cascade is applied at the mathematical level. This means that no changes to the application interface or user flow are required and that HOWARD is operating system and hardware platform agnostic. Once an application or data communication model has been parallelized using HOWARD, results are returned in a fraction of the time as compared to applications using traditional parallelization techniques, such as Message Passing Interface. The HOWARD Cascade supports true linear scaling so that when nodes are added to the cluster, the full power of the nodes can be taken advantage of, rather than only 10-20% when processing closely coupled problems. "The HOWARD Cascade and Virtual Power Center technology covered in this patent open the door to inexpensive, readily available and simple-to-use supercomputing power," added Smith. "We are driven to continuously develop innovative technologies that support our focus on delivering supercomputing power to the everyday person."