Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) strengthened its management team today, adding two new executives with extensive experience and talent in the technical computing industry. ISC board member, Bill Strecker, has formally joined the company as its chief technology officer (CTO), while former AMD HPC Marketing Director David Rich joins as vice president of marketing. ISC develops Star-P, a software platform that 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. In addition to his expanded role at ISC, Strecker is a general partner at Flagship Ventures, an ISC investor. Prior to that, he was senior vice president (SVP) of technology and corporate development and CTO of Compaq Computer Corp. Earlier, he worked for 28 years at Digital Equipment Corporation in various executive and senior technical positions, most recently as SVP of corporate strategy and technology and CTO. Strecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He has received the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE) W. Wallace McDowell Award for outstanding contributions to the Computer Art. He is a past board member of CMGI, holds 16 U.S. patents, and is the author of numerous technical publications. In addition to ISC, he currently serves as Director of IntelliVid, Maptuit and SiCortex. “The semiconductor industry continues to deliver Moore’s Law increases in semiconductor density but architecture and heat considerations severely limit the ability to convert increased density into increased single processor performance. However, customers continue to demand ever higher performance computers,” said Strecker. “The result is that every performance-oriented computer system will be built with large to truly massive numbers of processors. ISC’s vision is to make these systems easily accessible to end users who want to solve their business and technical problems without learning the intricacies of programming and managing these systems.” Rich brings to ISC more than 23 years of marketing, sales and support experience in both large and entrepreneurial high tech companies. At AMD he directed the company’s entry into the HPC cluster market and secured large wins such as the Red Storm system at Sandia National Laboratories and the Dawning 4000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. At the same time, he served as president of the HyperTransport Consortium, a standards organization which develops specifications for high-speed interconnect technology. Rich’s earlier experience includes being the founding manager of the TotalView product line, which has become the de facto standard for parallel and distributed debugging. He served as vice president of Fujitsu System Technologies, which developed high-speed networking technology that was a pre-cursor to InfiniBand. His parallel processing experience started at BBN Technologies where he worked on the Butterfly series of computers. Rich received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University. “ISC is solving the most critical problem facing the HPC industry, namely, lowering the cost and complexity of parallel programming to make users more productive. That’s why I joined. It’s an exciting and lucrative opportunity to help research organizations solve some of the world’s most daunting problems and for commercial customers to earn a better ROI,” Rich said. “I am confident Star-P will be an essential platform on which a majority of compute-driven organizations will depend in the near future.”