Mr Laurence Liew: Our investment into developing NumaManager will allow us to be a global player in the new generation of large-memory systems.

Local startup 1degreenorth may have been incorporated only in March 2010, but it brings together a wealth of expertise in high performance computing (HPC) that stretches back over a decade. That track record puts it in a strong position to help companies build cloud and large systems infrastructure and tap on compute-intensive business analytics applications to analyse and predict business trends.

Members of 1degreenorth’s team hail from different organisations, but have been involved in introducing HPC Linux clusters in Singapore back in 1999, and in VMWare virtualisation in 2002. Many were also involved in operating the first National Grid Pilot Project with the National University of Singapore, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research and the National Grid Office in 2003, said Mr Laurence Liew, Chief Executive Officer of 1degreenorth. Then in 2010, the opportunity to create a new market in cloud computing, with advanced, state-of-the-art technology for large shared memory systems, presented itself.

1degreenorth specialises in providing expertise in leading-edge solutions and implementation services for public and private cloud infrastructures. In particular, it is working with Cloud.com, one of the leading providers of cloud software, to design and build Infrastructure-as-a-Service setups for companies in Singapore.

“We are currently helping a customer build out a public cloud offering for the Singapore market, and are also engaged with several customers and partners in their private and public cloud initiatives,” said Mr Liew.

In addition, 1degreenorth is also leveraging its HPC expertise by building large-scale, large-memory systems for data intensive computations for its customers, particularly in North Asia, using Numascale’s technology.

“There is high demand for such HPC systems in China and Korea and we can build these at commodity pricing, about one-tenth the price of a traditional SMP server,” said Mr Liew.

The company is co-developing advanced shared memory system tools called NumaManager which will be 1degreenorth’s intellectual property. “The unique proposition of Numascale technology, coupled with our own  NumaManager technology, will allow us to differentiate ourselves from the competition.”

“Our investment into developing NumaManager will allow us to grow beyond Singapore and be a global player in the new generation of large-memory systems,” said Mr Liew. “We already see keen interest from customers and I foresee growing adoption of these advanced systems in Singapore and other regions.”

The NumaManager project has also been supported by SPRING Singapore, which awarded 1degreenorth funding under its Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (Proof of Value) for further development.

A third prong of 1degreenorth’s business strategy involves business analytics. The company is partnering popular tool vendor, Revolution R, to provide commercial and enterprise-grade solutions to organisations in Singapore. “We believe the open-source R language will be the de facto standard for predictive business analytics,” said Mr Liew.