Federally funded research may help ISR

Officials from Liberty Lake tech company Isothermal Systems Research will gather in Richland on Monday to discuss federal efforts to advance the use of its products in the nation’s fastest supercomputers.

From staff reports

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/business/story.asp?ID=17952

ISR, with offices in Liberty Lake and Clarkston, will benefit from $3 million already enacted in the federal budget for energy research related to cooling down supercomputers.

Monday morning, U.S. Congressman George Nethercutt, R-Spokane, will host a press gathering in Richland to talk about that money and an extra $2.5 million currently in the House version of the 2005 federal budget.

ISR manufactures high-end spraycooling systems used to cool computer systems and enclosed electronic circuits. Under the federal project, ISR will work with a Silicon Valley firm, Tessera Technologies, to develop better ways of cooling supercomputers — arrays of multiple processors that are bundled or clustered for advanced computing. Combining the spraycool systems of ISR with Tessera’s unique thin, bendable polymer-based circuit boards, could create breakthroughs in the design of supercomputers, Nethercutt said in a press release.

The Monday press event will be held at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which hosts one of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers. PNNL’s Hewlett-Packard cluster of nearly 2,000 Intel-powered processors can process 11.6 teraflops, or a trillion "floating point operations" per second.

The results of the research project could lead to more jobs and more contracts for ISR, said an aide in Nethercutt’s Washington, D.C., office.

The results of the research could lead to more high-tech jobs in Eastern Washington as the technology is applied to more computers, and cements PNNL as a national leader in supercomputing research, Nethercutt’s office press release added.