Why did Microsoft buy Star-P (Interactive Supercomputing)
Sep 25th, 2009 by admin
Star P is a leading parallel compute platform, essentially allowing automated parallelisation of Matlab and Python code, making it simple for users of these technologies to develop serial models and then run them much faster with minimal changes. It has simple client side API and deployed standard libraries to the back end using NumPy, SciPy and Octave as the computation engines. Its a good product, I have used it, and Sales for Star-P were pretty good across academia and engineering (mechanical, chemical, exploration etc) industries.
I wouldn’t think that Python and Octave aren’t on Microsoft’s list of top technologies, and MatLab is rightfully impenetrable . So what is their game?
Well, it seems that Microsoft intend to shut down the product line, and the suggestion is that they were only interested in the people and the underlying technology. But if Microsoft wanted to they could have made offers that the staff at Star-P could not refuse, and they have more than enough resources to replicate the functionality of the underlying technology. And its nit as if Star-P were a competitor.
Perhaps it was just the fact that Interactive Supercomputing were up for sale and it was a good way of getting some clever people into the HPC R&D team. But perhaps too it is part of a Microsoft grand plan, a strategy to close down and eventually conquer the HPC community. Over the last few year the MicroSofties have put lots of effort into HPC, with an MPI stack, a server build to rival Linux and the HPC Cluster scheduler (a Condor competitor) but as yet they have only managed to get their operating system on to 1% of the top500 list. There are a lot of licenses to be sold in this market and microsoft are not happy with their share.
It is possible that Microsoft will develop a product that sits in the space that Star-P used to sit - auto parallelisation of well known client apps, and it is likely that this will be an add on to the HPC and Excel cluster offerings. It is also likeley that Microsoft will be looking around for other companies to acquire that have a portion of the HPC market already, or a good idea that will get them one. I don’t know who is next - but I would keep your eyes on the small HPC solutions vendors, and of course on Microsoft who are growing in this space.
