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While computing giants such as Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. have made news launching high-performance computing-related products into the market, a handful of local companies have been attracting investors, launching new products and announcing new customers and partners.
But the new market swell isn’t being driven by multimillion-dollar, peta-flop scale computers, but by smaller clusters, focused on serving a broad range of industries, from life sciences to manufacturing.
Earlier this month, Waltham-based high-performance computing (HPC) software developer Interactive Supercomputing Inc. landed $2 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank. The new funds, added to the $18 million in venture capital the company brought in earlier, will allow it to continue to distribute its Star-P parallel computing platform, which is designed to make high-performance computing more user-friendly for researchers outside of the computer science field.
The deal comes two months after Maynard-based SiCortex Inc., a maker of energy-efficient high-performance computers, closed a $37 million Series B round of funding that featured some of the area’s well-known venture firms, including Waltham-based Polaris Venture Partners, Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures and Needham-based Prism VentureWorks.
But the spate of activity is not limited to investment. Billerica-based HPC switch maker Voltaire Inc. (Nasdaq: VOLT), recently launched a new product line, upping the company’s previous 20 gigabit-per-second switch to 40 gigabits per second. In Avon, HPC storage appliance maker Terascala Inc. announced a new customer in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, which will be using Terascala’s hardware to store vast amounts of research while also making it accessible to other organizations outside the agency.
“For years, people thought of HPC as guys in labs doing exotic things,” said Rick Friedman, vice president of marketing and product management at Terascala. “But in the last two or three years, these computing architectures are moving more and more out of labs and into solving general business problems.”
Because of the diversification of problems being researched and solved in HPC environments, the growth of the industry isn’t happening as much in the upper echelons of cluster computing, where large companies or universities have long-standing relationships with supercomputing, but in the midsize range. Machines like IBM Corp.’s RoadRunner, the reigning fastest computer in the world, are still reserved for the most complex computing tasks, but a swell of midsize HPC computing platforms, priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than the millions, is driving the computing power, and the market, to a broader customer base.
Analyzing the movement of financial markets, modeling automotive crash tests, simulating weather and site demographics in the building of wind turbines, and medical imaging are just some of the applications cited by various executives.
“For companies like us, it’s not about the top 500 clusters (in the world),” said Chris Stone, CEO of SiCortex. “It’s about the middle 12,000 or 15,000.”
According to a report earlier this year from Framingham’s IDC, the HPC market is expected to grow 9.1 percent annually over the next five years, reaching $15.5 billion by 2011.
But as the local cluster attacks the market, bigger names are also getting involved. Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 in September, while Oracle is moving in a similar direction with the recent release of the HP Oracle Database Machine, which uses Infiniband switches designed for HPC environments from Voltaire.
“Microsoft is, ironically, the new kid on the block,” said David Rich, vice president of marketing at Interactive Supercomputing, adding that the entry of larger companies adds validation to the industry, rather than a competitive environment.
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