INDUSTRY

Platform Computing announced today an agreement whereby Platform has acquired HP-MPI (Message Passing Interface) from HP.  Platform has purchased the technology assets and intellectual property associated with HP-MPI software.  In addition, Platform has hired key members of the HP-MPI development team.  Under the terms of the deal, HP will continue to sell and market HP-MPI under the Platform MPI brand. This acquisition supports Platform's strategy to extend its leadership in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software with development of a world-leading MPI product.

HP-MPI is a fully integrated implementation of MPI, an industry standard message passing protocol used by resource intensive applications to run parallel processes over multiple nodes in a computing cluster.  Platform currently has an MPI product (formerly Scali MPI) and a key objective for the company has been securing broader adoption of Platform MPI by more independent software vendors (ISVs).  HP-MPI is used and distributed by more than 30 ISVs, making it the most widely adopted MPI software across many industries, including Oil and Gas, Industrial Manufacturing, Government & Research, Education, Life Sciences and Financial Services. Platform's plan is to combine the superior performance of its existing MPI technology with HP-MPI's broad ISV acceptance to create a single, comprehensive and powerful product named Platform MPI.  HP-MPI and Platform's current MPI products will continue on current release cycles and be maintained to support existing customers for an interim period. In addition, Platform will continue support for legacy versions of each product even after the release of a combined offering.

"The acquisition of HP-MPI enables Platform to continue its leadership in HPC by offering customers an industry-leading tool to improve application performance through parallel processing.  This represents a move forward in Platform's vision to expand our product offerings with best-of-breed HPC management software for heterogeneous computing environments," said Songnian Zhou, CEO, Platform Computing.  "HP-MPI not only improves application performance, but offers our ISV business partners a stable, commercially supported environment for the continued development of their compute- and data-intensive applications."

"Customers running high-performance computing clusters have chosen HP-MPI to further improve the performance of their systems, speeding development time," said Scott Misage, director, Solutions Research and Development, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization, HP. "HP, together with Platform, will deliver continued support for existing HP-MPI users. In addition, Platform's investments in MPI will continue to move the technology forward, making it even easier to use, faster and more cost-effective over the long term."

Platform will continue to develop and enhance the MPI product by working with HP to provide customers with an attractive product offering delivering the best in performance and hardware compatibility.  HP will resell Platform's MPI technology and Platform will build upon HP's strong marketing and product support for ISV's who have standardized their parallel applications and cluster support around HP-MPI.

This agreement expands on a long-term partnership between HP and Platform in which Platform's products have become integral parts of HP's HPC software solutions,  For example, Platform LSF is integrated with other HP technologies to provide a comprehensive workload management solution that improves system throughput and speeds time to solution.