Altair Acquires Ellexus

Altair has acquired Ellexus, an input/output (I/O) analysis tool, which helps customers find and address issues quickly, improving speed accuracy and cloud readiness.

The Ellexus software products, Mistral and Breeze, are used for I/O diagnostics, optimization and dependency detection by high-performance computing administrators of large enterprises. Altair plans to integrate them into the storage aware scheduling functionality of Altair PBS Works.

“Altair continues to expand its reach and capabilities for HPC environments to support important modern workloads including for data analytics, AI and ADAS,” says James Scapa, Altair’s chief executive officer and founder. “The acquisition of Ellexus is particularly relevant in these domains as storage aware scheduling for big data applications is critical.”

The recent acquisition of Univa positions Altair as a scheduling and resource optimization solution provider for parallel and high-throughput, single-core jobs, the companies say. Ellexus complements Altair’s scheduling technology by providing per-job storage agnostic file and network I/O real-time monitoring to identify I/O latencies and bottlenecks for faster job execution times and better resource use.

Altair says it will also deepen its technical ranks with the addition of Dr. Rosemary Francis, Ellexus founder and chief executive officer. Francis earned a Ph.D. in computer architecture from the University of Cambridge and an undergraduate degree in math and computer science. She is a regular guest lecturer at Cambridge University and is a member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

“There is no better place for Ellexus’ products to get into the hands of global customers who can immediately benefit,” says Francis. “Altair’s growing leadership in HPC is exciting and exactly where I want to be to help grow the business and stretch technology to its limits.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.