A software startup introduced a platform Monday for supercomputing systems based on IBM’s Cell BE chips and other speedy processors.

PeakStream, based in Redwood City, California, claims its platform helps users program the latest high-performance computing systems, which are able to process workloads much more quickly. These systems use multi-core processors, graphics processor units (GPUs), and/or Cell chips.

Last week IBM announced a supercomputing system dubbed Roadrunner (see A PS3-based Supercomputer?).

Roadrunner is expected to work on certain problems faster than ever while overcoming the overheating and other problems that prevent the current crop of supercomputers from achieving 1 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, or a speed of 1 petaflop.

PeakStream received $17 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Foundation Capital.

The startup is banking on the migration of typical supercomputer users—oil companies, Wall Street firms, defense departments, and research facilities—to the new computing systems. And it hopes its own technology, which it calls stream programming, will lead the way.

“The criticism [of such systems] is that they’re very difficult to program,” PeakStream CEO Neil Knox told Red Herring. PeakStream’s platform makes the job easier, he said.

Lucrative Space

It’s a lucrative space for any company. High-performance computing (HPC), or supercomputing, was a $9-billion market in 2005, according to IDC. Even nontraditional customers are increasingly using HPC to create everything from more durable packaging to animation in movies like King Kong and Lord of the Rings.

“Clearly speech processes have a lot of potential,” Mr. Knox said. For example, linguistic researchers have begun using HPC technology to trace literary origins (see HP Has High-Performance Lead).

To be sure, most initial users of these new systems will be from the research or government realms. Customers who installed a recently unveiled blade server based on the Cell chip tended to be academic or research-based (see IBM Not Waiting for PS3).

Those using these new high-performance computers would likely gravitate toward IBM software, which would help IBM make money off these systems.

For the quarter that ended in June, IBM’s software sales rose 4.5 percent to $4.24 billion, making up more than 19 percent of the company’s $21.9 billion in revenue for the quarter (see IBM Profit Beats Expectations).

But that’s where PeakStream fits in. Mr. Knox claimed that not even IBM, which developed the Cell chip with Sony and Toshiba for the PlayStation 3 console, offers the kind of software that PeakStream has developed.

Fitting in with IBM

“It’s complementary to IBM, not competitive,” insisted Mr. Knox, whose top executives came from Sun, NVIDIA, VMware, and Network Appliance. “For IBM to gain robust adoption of Cell [systems], customers need to have an easy-to-use environment.”

At least one customer is ready to use the speedier systems.

“In the past few years, blazingly fast multi-core processors, like GPUs, have brought the HPC market enormous potential,” Scott Morton, manager of geophysical technology at Amerada Hess Corporation, said in a statement. “But it has been difficult to harness their power because there hasn’t been an easy way to program them.”

Contact the writer:ECubarrubia@RedHerring.com

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