A relatively new upstart is entering the fiercely competitive high performance computing (HPC) server market this week. OctigaBay Systems Corp, a two-year-old startup founded by VCs and experts in HPC and telecoms systems, is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and its new OctigaBay 12K machine, which runs Linux and can scale to 12,000 64-bit Opteron processors in a cluster, presents an interesting challenge to IBM Corp, Hewlett Packard Co, Cray Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, and SGI Inc as they chase the HPC dollars.

OctigaBay is not a real place in Canada, by the way, but a made up name to reflect that there are eight major investors in the company. The company is the third startup for Paul Terry, who works as chief technology officer at the company; he was co-founder and CTO of Abatis Systems, an IP networking specialist that was eventually bought by Redback Networks. OctigaBay's CEO, John Seminerio, was a partner at venture capitalist Magellan Angel Partners and has two decades of telecom experience, including stints with Nortel Networks and DSC Communications. With the launch of its 12K system, OctigaBay is opening a sales office in Richardson, Texas, suburb of Dallas. This is near one of the hottest hotbeds of supercomputing in the world, thanks to the never-ending processing needs of the oil and gas exploration industries. OctigaBay has 60 employees, and the 12K is its first product.

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