Start-up enables energy-efficient high-performance computing

PRESS RELEASE

17 October 2008

Four experts in high-performance computing have set up Petapath (Bristol, UK), 
a company aimed at delivering heterogeneous computing solutions to a range of
applications in the high-performance computing sector.

Systems used in enterprise computing often use only a fraction of their
available computing capacity. Petapath's technology will give customers access
to the unexploited capacity, delivering increased performance with only 
a moderate increase in power usage.

"When GPUs/CPUs and FPGAs started being used to accelerate computation, the
available development tools and environments were not intended for this use and
were unfamiliar to the typical scientist or engineer," explains Michal
Harasimiuk, CEO of Petapath. "Our expertise lies in programming these
accelerators and heterogeneous systems to get the most out of their
capabilities."

Petapath's software, which uses existing standards, is platform-independent and
exploits powerful distributed computing technology to harness the parallel
processing capabilities of multi-core CPUs/GPUs. It is applicable to any
industry that require energy-efficient high-performance computing power such as
the finance industry, oil and gas companies, scientific computing applications
and the aerospace industry.


"Because we are platform independent, we can work with a wide variety of
hardware providers to deliver the best solution to our customers," says
Harasimiuk. "Using multi-core technology, we can reduce simulation times from
weeks to hours."

Harasimiuk and his co-founders, Neil Hickey, Dairsie Latimer and Phillip Power
met while working at hardware supplier ClearSpeed (Bristol, UK), one of the
innovators in accelerator technology. The founders have many years of expertise
in heterogeneous systems for high-performance computing. They were part of the
team which developed the Tsubame - the first heterogeneous supercomputer to make
it into the Top500 list of supercomputers - and have expertise in embedded
systems, compiler and low-level coding, programming tools and enterprise
applications.

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About Petapath
Petapath is a supplier of heterogeneous computing solutions in the high-
performance computing sector. Its expertise and technology dramatically
increases computing performance with only a moderate increase in power
dissipation. Petapath's software technology can be applied to any application
using high-performance computing, from banking and entertainment, to scientific
and mathematical modelling. Petapath's technology is a cost-effective, energy-
efficient way of increasing computer performance into the petaflop/s regime.
www.petapath.com


Press contact:
Michal Harasimiuk
michal@petapath.com
+44(0)117 911 7544
+44(0)778 718 5248