ISC Launches Partner Program to Help Make Cluster Computing Ubiquitous
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WALTHAM, Mass., June 27 / -- Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) today launched a new Partner Program aimed at accelerating scientific discovery by making high-performance computers (HPCs), tools and software ubiquitous and easy-to-use.
The Star-P Solution Partner Program promotes the development of products and services that work with the Star-P interactive parallel computing platform. Star-P transforms powerful parallel supercomputers into easy-to-use, interactive desktop tools for rapidly solving large scientific and engineering problems.
The Partner Program targets hardware OEMs, resellers of technical computing products and services, and scientific software developers. It is designed to boost the productivity of scientists and engineers by providing them a rich ecosystem of Star-P-compatible computing platforms, applications and numerical libraries.
For example, Ken Stanley of 500 Software is a new Star-P partner who developed an interface to Trilinos, an open source project developed by the Sandia National Labs to help facilitate the design, development, integration and ongoing support of mathematical software libraries. "We were able to easily interface to Star-P the Trilinos software framework and library, which provides broad-ranging high-performance capabilities for solving numerical systems at the heart of many complex multiphysics applications," he said. "This dramatically expands the range of solvers and computing power that users can leverage."
Since its launch in November 2005, Star-P has gained a loyal and growing customer base across the scientific and engineering communities. It allows users to develop models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MathWorks' MATLAB®, and run them instantly and interactively on HPC servers. Star-P eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, Fortran or MPI languages to run on HPCs -- a productivity-killing step that can take months to years to complete for large, complex and computationally intensive problems. It automatically parallelizes the applications on the fly.
"Resellers and software partners will be able to expand their markets by extending their applications and libraries to parallel servers, while hardware partners gain an enormous base of users that previously couldn't utilize their systems," said Ilya Mirman, ISC's vice president of marketing. "We've designed Star-P to be an extensible platform into which codes used by thousands of users can be easily plugged in and reused."
The Star-P Solution Partner Program has three levels of participation:
o Star-P Hardware Partners are hardware system manufacturers or integrators that deliver and support both systems and software for deployment. Star-P will be certified and highly optimized on the hardware OEMs' systems. Hardware partners will offer Star-P to their direct and indirect sales channels and offer customer support.
o Star-P Value-Added Reseller Partners are organizations with sales and marketing reach, contract vehicles, consulting or professional services offerings around parallel servers, MATLAB utilization, or parallel application development. Resellers will be authorized to resell Star-P and personnel will be trained to offer professional
services and support to customers and prospects. The primary focus for the remainder of 2006 will be on U.S.-based resellers.
"We are excited by the opportunity to bring to the research community a new breakthrough technology that will let scientists and other technical users who work with desktop simulation tools tap the power of parallel computing without having to re-program their code," said Tom Mountcastle, president of James River Technical, a leading provider of high-performance computing solutions. "Star-P provides easy, automatic parallelization of both new and existing codes, enabling our customers to achieve faster time to discovery. It's the first solution we've seen that turns parallel supercomputers into truly interactive tools."
o Star-P Software Partners are commercial vendors as well as the open source community developing numerical libraries, legacy Fortran, C, C++ algorithms, serial MATLAB codes, or other models or applications that can be plugged into Star-P. Software partners will have a close working relationship with ISC to expand the overall community of parallel application development using the Star-P platform. Software
partners will have access to Star-P developer licenses, access to a hosted Star-P environment, development assistance and certification testing.
"By integrating our IMSL Libraries into the Star-P platform, we can empower MATLAB users with a dramatically extended range of functions and computing power. By partnering with ISC, Visual Numerics can bring the power of parallel computing to scientists and engineers who prefer to work in a familiar interactive environment," said Ed Stewart, IMSL Product Manager at Visual Numerics. "Desktop users will be able to explore a larger parameter space, and create custom parallel applications that can take full range of Visual Numerics' application-specific capabilities in areas including linear programming, neural networks, differential equations, and time series analysis."
Vendors interested in participating in the Star-P Solution Partner Program should contact ISC's Business Development team (sales@interactivesupercomputing.com), or visit http://interactivesupercomputing.com/solutionpartner.
About Interactive Supercomputing
Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) launched in 2004 to commercialize Star-P, an interactive parallel computing platform. With automatic parallelization and interactive execution of existing desktop simulation applications, Star-P merges two previously distinct environments -- desktop computers and high performance servers -- into one. Based in Waltham, Mass., the privately held company markets Star-P for a range of security, intelligence, manufacturing, energy, biomedical, financial, and scientific research applications. For more information, visit http://www.interactivesupercomputing.com/.
Contacts:
Ilya Mirman
Interactive Supercomputing
781-419-5088 imirman@interactivesupercomputing.commdillon@beaupre.com
Michelle Dillon
Beaupre & Co. Public Relations
603-559-5835
Source: Interactive Supercomputing
CONTACT: Ilya Mirman of Interactive Supercomputing, +1-781-419-5088,
imirman@interactivesupercomputing.com; or Michelle Dillon of Beaupre & Co.
Public Relations, for Interactive Supercomputing, +1-603-559-5835,
mdillon@beaupre.com
Web site: http://www.interactivesupercomputing.com/
