Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Will Schroeder . Here’s that interview
About the interviewee
Dr. Will Schroeder is President, CEO, and co-founder of Kitware. In addition to identifying technology and business opportunities for Kitware, Will provides technical leadership to large open-source, scientific computing software projects in the areas of medical imaging, high-performance computing, 3D visualization, and web-based data analytics.
Will is a strong advocate for open approaches and has demonstrated his advocacy through invited presentations at a number of technical conferences.
Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.).
Kitware is a leader in the creation and support of open-source software and state-of-the-art technology in the fields of medical computing, scientific computing, computer vision, data management, and software process. Among our support services, we offer technology integration, consulting, and training for advanced R&D software solutions. We have over 100 employees in offices in Clifton Park, NY; Carrboro, NC; Santa Fe, NM; and Lyons, France.
Kitware participates extensively in collaborations. For example, we serve as a research and development collaborator for Google Project Tango. We have also collaborated with organizations including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Brown University, Children’s National Medical Center, Army Research Laboratory, National Science Foundation, and many National Labs such as Los Alamos, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Argonne.
What type and size of companies do you have as clients?
Kitware’s clients range in size from small businesses to large international organizations. They include research laboratories, leading academic institutions, and commercial organizations. A detailed list of our clients and collaborators can be found at http://www.kitware.com/company/collaborators.html.
What comes to mind when you see this topic (Next Major Game Player in Tech)?
Simulation as a (Web) service: moving the engineering design and simulation process to the Web, including high-performance computing on the Cloud.
Advanced manufacturing, based on high-performance computing (HPC), modeling and simulation (M&S), is a strategic capability of fundamental importance to the economic strength and national security of the United States. Due to the emergence of web- and cloud-based technologies, M&S is now becoming viable. Not only can computational, cloud-based services that support high-performance computing be purchased relatively economically and on a per-need basis, but Web-based systems provide the potential to greatly simplify the deployment and use of the underlying computational infrastructure.
What are the best practices when it comes to this issue?
To create Web solutions that combine complex HPC resources and advanced M&S, you need to implement a sophisticated yet flexible architecture that can be easily adapted to a variety of problems and support easily configurable computational workflows. Such workflows can be specified interactively through a web browser, providing a variety of simulation capabilities that cover the gamut of advanced modeling and simulation techniques. In addition, using a web browser for simple access and tapping into the emergence of cloud computing will help ensure that the M&S service is affordable.
Contact information:
www.kitware.com
