INDUSTRY

Former Cray and SGI Innovator Heads Funded Research Efforts: Interactive Supercomputing Inc. (ISC) announced today that Steve Reinhardt, a former Cray Research and SGI veteran, has joined the company as vice president of joint research. Reinhardt is a prominent innovator in the high performance computing industry, with accomplishments that span development of the first UNIX-based supercomputers at Cray in the mid-1980s to the pioneering of shared- and distributed-memory parallel programming environments. In this new position, Reinhardt will head ISC's funded research efforts, where ISC works closely with leading-edge customers to find new ways to make high performance computing (HPC) easier, more productive and more accessible to technical computing users. Reinhardt has worked on parallel system designs for a number of notable projects, including his roles at Cray as the software project leader for the Cray T3D project and then project director for the T3E project, which is considered by many to be one of the best parallel systems ever developed. He also helped lead development of SGI's Altix systems, which were the first strongly scalable supercomputers to be built from mass-market components (industry-standard Intel processors with the Linux operating system) and thereby affordable by a wider range of customers. Most recently, Reinhardt was a chief engineer at SGI applying Star-P to computationally demanding problems, especially graph analysis and pattern discovery. His continuing interests are the integration of hardware, software and application abilities to provide high system performance, and the development of easier programming models and job scheduling to exploit the performance of highly parallel systems. Reinhardt received his bachelor of science degree in computer science from Yale University and is about to finish a masters of biological science with a minor in bioinformatics from the University of Minnesota. "Steve is a coup for us due to his many years of product development leadership at Cray Research and SGI," said Bill Blake, ISC's CEO. "He has been the leader and champion of Star-P development at SGI since 2003. He knows how to push the state of the art in productivity for high performance computing." ISC develops Star-P, an interactive parallel computing platform that enables users to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MATLAB and Python and run them instantly and interactively on parallel HPCs. "With all the societal challenges we face today (e.g., climate change, AIDS pandemic, national security), we as an HPC industry have to make as big an impact as humanly possible to remain relevant, and yet we are not," said Reinhardt. "In my view that is mainly because the HPC systems we build are too difficult to program. I believe that Star-P is exactly the type of platform that can break through the current logjam in productivity, and I wanted to be a part of making that potential a reality. ISC is completely focused on the mission of simple access from the desktop to parallel HPC systems."