GOVERNMENT

Powerllel is now ASPEED Software. This name change reflects the company's emphasis on application acceleration. The company's specific focus is on software that enables application owners to expedite the migration of computationally intensive applications - no matter how complex - to cluster and grid configurations and then to ensure ongoing optimum response times and scalability. Since receiving venture funding early this year, ASPEED (www.aspeed.com) has worked closely with key financial and pharmaceutical companies to create an algorithm-aware software product, ACCELLERANT, which easily adapts and accelerates algorithm-intensive applications to exploit cluster and grid configurations. ACCELLERANT offers the only viable and repeatable solution for quickly achieving predictable and scalable response time improvements, while maintaining computational integrity in grid and cluster environments. ACCELLERANT enables programmers to quickly adapt the most complex application, model or simulation without changing the logic, immediately realizing significant and scalable run time reductions. ASPEED's ACCELLERANT is already used by several of the world's largest banks, where it ensures optimal run times for critical business applications including risk management, portfolio optimization and pricing. The software has proven to be equally as effective in accelerating single-thread applications by exploiting multi-CPU and workgroup configurations, as well as accelerating applications originally designed to run on high-end Symmetric Multi-Processor UNIX-based configurations, by quickly exploiting cluster and grid configurations. ASPEED's ACCELLERANT also helps companies more quickly embrace newer, faster and less expensive hardware and provides them with much desired low-cost scalability by removing the inhibitors. "Our customers are making better decisions, because they can get the answers faster, include more data in the analysis and run more 'what ifs'. This gives them competitive advantage," said Joe McCurdy, CEO of ASPEED Software. "And they can realize this advantage in days rather than months without diverting precious technical resources." ACCELLERANT includes all the elements to effectively distribute existing single-thread and multi-thread applications to support multi-CPU, cluster and grid configurations. This includes data movement services including serialization and un-serialization, random number generators, algorithm-aware adapters for effectively handling linear, e.g. Monte Carlo; non-linear, e.g. quasi-Newtonian and complex geometric algorithms, e.g. trees algorithms; as well as the appropriate middleware to ensure efficient and effective communications among the distributed instances. ASPEED Software was founded in 2002 and is based in New York. The team is comprised of well-seasoned experts in numerical analysis, business and scientific modeling, and experienced "quants", distributed systems technologists and application software developers. ASPEED received $5.6 million in funding from Castile Ventures and Kodiak Venture Partners earlier this year.