Engineered Intelligence talks new language

Former HP marketing exec designs parallel computing breakthrough

FORT COLLINS — Martin Heller, a columnist for the on-line magazine Byte.com, calls parallel computing “one of the ?holy grails’ of the computer science community.”

If so, then the founders of Engineered Intelligence Corp. may be on to something historical.

EI Corp. has developed a new programming language, a product called CxC Compiler (pronounced “C by C”), to make parallel computing accessible to the masses.

The groundbreaking technology recently received a favorable review from Heller and won over judges for The Northern Colorado Business Report’s 2003 IQ Awards, who called it the best idea in the category for information technology products and services.

Fundamentally, CxC Compiler provides a simplified path to parallel computing, which EI Corp. likes to call “desktop supercomputing.”

Currently, increasing numbers of companies are investing in clusters of computer servers as a cost-saving alternative to so-called supercomputers. Clusters can be acquired at about one-tenth of the cost of a supercomputer with similar power, said Jim Gutowski, executive vice president of marketing and sales for EI Corp.

Technology research company Gartner Group predicts that 20 percent of all new server shipments will be installed as clusters by 2006. IDC estimates the cluster computing market now at $2.5 billion.

However, programming clusters to manage complex calculations is difficult. It’s a specialized job that’s often beyond the capabilities of many scientists and researchers.

Even then, the computations on clusters are processed in serial fashion — waiting for one model to be processed before moving on to process the next.

CxC Compiler provides “runtime software that can segment complex algorithms and run them in parallel,” EI contends in its company literature.

Additionally, the programming product allows frontline researchers to develop parallel applications on their own from a laptop or personal computer.

One of the early success stories with CxC Compiler was at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where the school’s department of chemistry and biochemistry put the product to work on a molecular modeling problem.

The CxC application achieved a solution “up to 10 times faster” than the previous serialized solution, said Arun Venkathanathan, a UCLA researcher.

“We were able to analyze quite efficiently with a minimum knowledge of C++ (computer language,” Venkathanathan said.

Engineered Intelligence Corp. is the brainchild of former Hewlett-Packard marketing executive Matt Oberdorfer. While he was with HP, the company moved Oberdorfer to its Fort Collins site to manage marketing for its cluster computing business. But at night he was working on his own ideas for software.

Eventually Oberdorfer left HP and brought together some of his former colleagues, including Gutowski, to organize EI Corp.

The business has eight founding partners and was privately financed. It currently employs four full-time staff and 15 total workers.

When the company introduced CxC to the market last November, the next challenge was persuading users to try it out.

“We’re introducing a new language,” Gutowski said. “How do you get people to use it? It’s not that easy.”

The marketing solution was innovative on its own.

EI Corp. announced a competition called Grid Wars, in which users could download a free sample of the CxC software and create a battle program.

Working with a 50 by 30 grid of nodes, the programmers created warriors. Dueling programs — each starting with half the grid — would then fight to see which one could consume the full grid.

About 4,500 users downloaded the Grid Wars program. The buzz from the event also drew the attention of Byte.com and Heller. EI Corp. was also invited to demonstrate CxC at last month’s Cluster World convention in San Jose, Calif., where the championship of Grid Wars was replayed on a large screen.

“People loved it,” Gutowkski said.

The next step for EI Corp. is to get computer hardware companies to love it.

EI Corp.’s goal is to persuade major vendors like HP, IBM, Dell and SGI to bundle CxC with its cluster computing products.

“The end game? Every cluster in the world that gets sold has our software bundled,” Gutowski said. “That’s our goal.”

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