INDUSTRY

On the heels of a product launch, Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) today announced it secured a $4.5 million Series-A investment. Flagship Ventures led the round, joined by Rock Maple Ventures and CommonAngels, a network of private investors and limited partners. The new financing will accelerate R&D and marketing efforts for ISC's Star-P software, interactive parallel computing platform which debuted at the Supercomputing Show 2005 in Seattle in November 2005. Star-P enables scientists and engineers to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages and run them interactively on high-performance clusters without having to re-program the applications for parallel processing. Ed Kania, managing director and chairman of Flagship Ventures, observed, "Computer vendors are now delivering massive and affordable computing power to technical computing users, but it is difficult to exploit this power due to programming complexities. ISC is delivering a solution which allows engineers, scientists and analysts to easily take advantage of this computing power." According to Dennis Costello, managing director of Rock Maple Ventures, investors were bullish on ISC because they saw an opportunity to create a new category in the rapidly growing billion dollar technical computing market. "This M.I.T.-born technology is enabling scientists and engineers to finally take advantage of the world's most powerful computers to solve the complex problems, without wasting time creating custom software for parallel processing systems," he said. "Parallel computing is becoming mainstream, and ISC is ideally positioned to ride this wave." "The funding comes at a time when the growth in the $8 billion market for high-performance servers for science and engineering is outpacing even the commercial server market," said Pete Peterson, ISC co-founder and CEO. "Driving this demand is the fact that even the most powerful desktop workstations can no longer handle many of the huge computational requirements of new mathematical models and algorithms. Yet very few commercial software applications are able to run at all on parallel computing architectures, let alone interactively. ISC is the first company to solve this problem." The company also announced that computer industry veteran, Dr. William Strecker, would be joining the company's board of directors. Dr. Strecker was previously CTO at Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq and a key developer of the cluster concept at Digital which is now the basis of most high performance computers today. Strecker is now a partner at Flagship Ventures and commented, "Today, there are two distinct technical computing environments: the interactive desktop, and the high-performance computing server. Star-P brings the two together, enabling the best of both worlds: the interactive and high-level interface of desktop tools, and the tremendous power of HPC servers." Joining Kania, Costello, Peterson, and Strecker on ISC's board are co- founder, Dr. Alan Edelman, professor of applied mathematics at MIT; Professor Ed Roberts, David Sarnoff professor of management of technology at MIT and founder and chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center; and veteran high performance computing executive, Dr. John Mucci. In conjunction with the Star-P launch last November, ISC announced a strategic distribution partnership with Silicon Graphics Inc. and a number of customers including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Connecticut, Wright- Patterson Air Force Base and the Ohio Supercomputing Center.