Tech startup of the month.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: High Tech Coloradobiz

ENGINEERED INTELLIGENCE

FORT COLLINS

ENGINEEREDINTELLIGENCE.COM

FOUNDED: APRIL 2002

INITIAL LIGHTBULB: Originally from Stuttgart, Germany, Matt Oberdorfer was a tech writer, penning five books about programming, before joining Hewlett-Packard as a manager in his native country. He jumped at an opportunity to transfer to Fort Collins in 1999; an earlier snowboarding trip had whetted his appetite for the Rockies.

Oberdorfer soon pinpointed cluster computing as an emerging industry. A cluster computer, also known as a parallel computer, consists of up to 2,000 traditional computers ("nodes") connected by a high-speed network. Recent innovations in hardware have made clusters capable of performance levels normally associated with multi-million dollar supercomputers. Like supercomputers, clusters are good for attacking big, highly complex problems, such as atmospheric modeling, aerospace design, or simulating car crashes.

Because there was no corresponding market for cluster software, Oberdorfer went out on his own and launched Engineered Intelligence Corp. with an octet of fellow ex-HP employees and other Fort Collins businesspeople. The mission: to build the Microsoft of parallel computing. Now Engineered Intelligence's president and CEO, Oberdorfer, 37, heads a staff of five full-time employees.

FINANCING: Its launch financed by the founders and angel investors, El closed on a Series A funding round with Menlo Park, Calif.-based U.S. Venture Partners in early March. The approximately $2 million infusion will allow El to hire sales staff, open a Bay Area office, and develop other products.

IN A NUTSHELL: "The new processors are getting as fast as the old (supercomputers) were, and if you hook a bunch of them together, you can get supercomputer performance," said Jim Gutowski, Engineered Intelligence's executive VP of marketing and sales. The upside: a cluster computer costs a fraction of the price of a supercomputer.

The downside: programming a cluster. "Today, it's very complex to do," said Gutowski. "Only the super-geeks can do it." To make cluster programming simpler, El developed its primary product, CXC (pronounced "C by C"), which serves as both an operating system and a development environment for cluster computers.

CXC "itself is a very simple language to program parallel computers," said Oberdorfer, who likened it to C and Java. "You can write a simple scientific algorithm without being a parallel computer expert ... and you can...