Date: 26/10/2020

Altair Acquires Ellexus and Univa

Altair has acquired of Ellexus, a leading 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 HPC 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," said 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."

Altair said the company will also deepen its technical ranks with the addition of Dr. Rosemary Francis, Ellexus founder and chief executive officer. Francis earned a PhD 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," said 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."

"Altair has invested significantly in HPC and cloud technologies for several years," said James Scapa, Altair's chief executive officer and founder. "The addition of Univa's technology and its very experienced team further cements our leadership position in this fast-moving space."

Altair has also acquired Univa, a leading innovator in enterprise-grade workload management, scheduling, and optimization solutions for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) on-premises and in the cloud.

The Univa acquisition enables Altair to further expand into life sciences and financial services.

"The Univa team is thrilled to join the Altair ecosystem and unleash the power of our technology," said Fritz Ferstl, chief technology officer of Univa. "We believe HPC is emerging as a critical element of digital transformation as it plays a significant role in all areas of computational science and data analytics."