Microsoft acquires Interactive Supercomputing

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), a US company that specialised in bringing the power of parallel computing to desktops and making high performance computing more accessible to end users. 

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which multiple calculations are carried out simultaneously. The idea is that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently.

"Microsoft plans to integrate ISC technologies into future versions of Microsoft products and will provide more information over the coming months on where and how that integration will occur," Microsoft said.

"This move represents our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high performance computing (HPC) and will bring together complementary technologies that will help simplify the complexity and difficulty of expressing problems that can be parallelised," said Kyril Faenov, general manager of high performance & parallel computing technologies at Microsoft.

"ISC's products and technology enable faster prototyping, iteration, and deployment of large-scale parallel solutions, which is well aligned with our vision of making high performance computing and parallel computing easier, both on the desktop and in the cluster," Faenov said.

Faenov said the former CEO of ISC, Bill Blake, was bringing a team of industry leading experts on parallel and high performance computing to join the Microsoft team at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"He [Bill Blake] and I are both excited to start working together on the next generation of technology for researchers, analysts, and engineers, as well as those who have yet to be exposed to the benefits of parallel computing and HPC technologies or may have thought they were out of reach," Faenov said.

"Beginning immediately, Microsoft will provide support for ISC's current Star-P customers and we are committed to continually listening to customer needs as we develop the next generation of HPC and parallel computing technologies," Faenov said.

According to a cached version of ISC's website, ISC's Star-P software allowed users performing scientific, engineering or analytical computation on array or matrix-based data to use parallel architectures such as multi-core workstations, multi-processor systems, distributed memory clusters or utility/cloud-based environments.