Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) received $11 million in new financing from current and new venture capital investors. Ascent Venture Partners, a new ISC investor, led the round, joined by Fletcher Spaght Ventures and current ISC investors Flagship Ventures, Rock Maple Ventures and CommonAngels. The new round brings ISC's total funding to $18 million. The new financing will enable ISC to extend the company's Star-P software into new markets and to support additional technical computing languages and libraries. Star-P enables scientists, engineers and analysts to build algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical tools - such as MATLAB, Python and R - and then run them instantly and interactively on parallel computers with little to no modification. Star-P eliminates the need to re-program applications in C, Fortran or MPI in order to run on parallel systems. Reprogramming can take months to complete for large, complex problems, so Star-P yields dramatic improvements in productivity - or "time to answer" - and makes problem solving an iterative, interactive process. Matt Fates of Ascent Venture Partners said his firm invested in Star-P because of the opportunity for breakthrough impact in science and engineering. "ISC's Star-P makes programming algorithms and software for high performance computers easier. Analysts, engineers and scientists can harness Star-P to solve their problems many times faster using any and all available computing resources. These folks are working on the world's toughest problems, and Star-P has the potential to help them unleash a flood of new scientific and engineering discoveries." Ed Kania, managing director and chairman of Flagship Ventures, said his firm re-invested in ISC due to the rapid market acceptance of Star-P, especially in the areas of biological and life sciences, finance and research. "Though barely two-years old, Star-P has already been adopted by many of the country's leading corporations, supercomputing labs and research institutions to help solve some of the most computationally challenging problems facing society," he said. For example, in the areas of research and life sciences: NASA is using Star-P to improve next generation space telescopes and other stellar imaging applications; the University of Texas at San Antonio is reverse-engineering the brain with Star-P in a quest to build better computers; and the University of Virginia uses Star-P to dramatically improve medical ultrasounds for more timely diagnoses of breast cancer and other life threatening conditions. "High performance computing has evolved from a nice-to-have to must-have technology for many research-driven organizations in order to stay competitive, whether its academic research or driving commercial product development," said Bill Blake, ISC's CEO. "This new funding will infuse our engineering efforts to make Star-P more feature rich, higher performing and easier to use for a wide base of customers."