Written By: Warren Frey

Supercomputing is the engine that drives our science, commerce, and communication. Giant search engines trawl the net with billions of queries, molecules are modeled and modified in massive simulations, and deep under Wall Street hulking processors trade massive blocks of money at the speed of light. But the era of the giant, room-spanning supercomputers may soon have some serious competition in the form of a small Calgary-based startup bringing supercomputing to the masses.

Calgary is known throughout Canada as the center of the country’s oil and gas industry, a booming city buoyed by the bubble-swelled profits of 20th century fossil fuel excess. It’s a prosperous if not especially cosmopolitan urban hub on the Canadian prairies. But tucked away in an unassuming office in the suburbs of this middling city, Tycrid Platform Technologies has been quietly putting together desktop systems boasting terahertz level horsepower under the hood since it was founded in 2008.

Miniaturization and Moore’s law have shrunk the components, but supercomputers still share one trait with their ancient, less powerful brethren; the ability to take up an entire room. The world’s fastest and most complex thinking machines may crunch stupendous amounts of data but they also take up a lot of space and require a surfeit of energy.

“Desktop supercomputing really changes the way people can work. In science, it allows those companies that need access to High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to have HPC performance affordably. What this does is let the researcher become more creative in the development of new science. Algorithms that used to be considered a ‘holy grail’ for HPC, can be attainable at the desktop level,” Tycrid president Chris Heier said.

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