Microsoft Steps Further into Parallel Computing with ISC Purchase

Redmond-based software company Microsoft has recently added a new item on its acquisition list, the Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) company, which is focused on delivering parallel-computing solutions to desktop machines so as to enable end users to benefit from access to high-performance computing. According to the company, the purchase of ISC's technology assets should enable it to make further advancements into its work on parallel computing and high performance computing.

Kyril Faeno, general manager, High Performance & Parallel Computing Technologies at Microsoft, stated in a blog post that a team of experts on parallel and high performance computing, led by Bill Blake, CEO of ISC, would join forces with Microsoft's team at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA. According to Faeno, who seems to be quite enthusiastic about the new acquisition, the two teams should be able to work together to “greatly improve the capability, performance, and accessibility of parallel computing and HPC technologies.”

“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 parallelized. 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,” Kyril Faeno stated.

At the same time, the Microsoft representative also stated that the software giant already started the work on integrating ISC technologies into the company's future products, and that more details on how things would move ahead would be unveiled during the following months. For the time being, however, Microsoft plans on providing support for ISC’s current Star-P customers. Star-P, reports PEHub, which brought news on the purchase since Monday, is described as a “technical computing software that enables users to code computing problems on their desktops using familiar mathematical software such as MATLAB and Python, and run them instantly and interactively on parallel high-performance computers (HPCs).”