Interactive Supercomputing Wins Government Grant

By DE Editors

Interactive Supercomputing Inc. (Waltham, MA) was awarded a U.S. research grant aimed at parallelizing popular desktop computing applications to run on high performance computers.

The grant from Oak Ridge National Labs will be used to develop toolkits that parallelize the algorithms and models resulting from popular desktop technical computing software such as MATLAB, Python, R, and IDL, also called Very High Level Language (VHLL) applications. The goal of the grants is to enable scientists and engineers to tap the parallel processing capabilities of high performance computers while minimizing development time.
 
The Oak Ridge National Labs project will explore where it is best to parallelize codes written in a VHLL, with potential applications including climate modeling, nanotechnology, biology, and modeling fusion reactions. The project will use existing mathematical libraries and solvers on the servers, accessing them from a VHLL on the desktop.

The project will use ISC’s Star-P software as the testing platform. Star-P is an interactive parallel computing platform that allows users to code algorithms and models on the desktop using familiar VHLLs and then run them on parallel servers or clusters without re-programming in C, FORTRAN or MPI.
 
Visit interactivesupercomputing.com for more information.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.