INDUSTRY

Interactive Supercomputing Inc. (ISC) has named Bill Blake its CEO, taking over the reins from ISC founder, Pete Peterson. Blake will be responsible for leading ISC through its next phase of growth as it scales from being a software startup to an established company with a deep customer and partner roster. Peterson will remain active in the company, serving as executive chairman of the board. Blake brings more than two decades of senior executive experience in developing high performance computing systems. He joins ISC from Netezza, where he was senior vice president of product development for the high performance data warehouse appliance company. He will continue as a technical advisor to Netezza, contributing to its technical direction. Blake previously was vice president of high performance technical computing (HPTC) at Compaq, where he led development and marketing efforts of HPTC solutions, including the company's AlphaServer SC supercomputers. "Bill's passion for high performance computing, market knowledge, and belief that ISC's solutions are critical to national productivity improvement convinced us that Bill is the right leader," said Peterson. "We believe his experience in building great commercial HPC products and demonstrated leadership will help lead ISC to great heights." ISC develops Star-P, an interactive parallel computing platform that enables users to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MATLAB and Python and run them instantly and interactively on parallel HPCs. Blake received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the Lowell Technological Institute. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. Blake is also a member of the board of directors of supercomputing pioneer, Cray, Inc., Etnus, Inc., a provider of analytical software for developing complex computer code, and Cluster File Systems, Inc., a developer of high performance file systems. "Star-P challenges the status quo that dramatic computational speedups through parallel processing cannot be easily accomplished by scientists, engineers and analysts using desktop tools," said Blake. "This overnight sensation stems from more than 10 years of M.I.T. research in high performance computing. I am excited to join the ISC team and help customers solve increasingly difficult problems without the delays and costs inherent in parallel programming."