Interview with Microway's Chairman of the Board, Ann Fried, who holds a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from Barnard College and an MAT from Harvard.

Q: Can you tell us about your background and interests on both a professional and a personal level?

A: I worked for both MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corp. before running an FAA Certified Flight School, FAA Part 135 Charter Service and a private aircraft maintenance facility. At Lincoln Lab I was a member of the team that did the first digital signal processing of medical x-rays in the late sixties. At Digital I was a member of the design team for MUMPS for the PDP-11. MUMPS is a medical data base program widely used in the seventies. I have been a member of the Boards of Plymouth Rotary and my local Temple. I also served as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Intel Channel Partner Program Premier Members for two years. I enjoy travel, gardening, classical music, reading, and my grandchildren.

Q: What do you think the company's greatest strengths and achievements are?

A: Microway's greatest strengths lie in our employees' ability to design solutions to meet our customers' needs. We have many of the same customers today who developed their careers in technical computing since 1982. The company grew from providing numeric hardware and software to the point where we are now supplying large, custom configured clusters, InfiniBand and storage products for those who have complex computational needs. We provide a team approach to solving configuration and software issues. Our greatest achievement is surviving for almost three decades in the computer industry. This took hard work and commitment to excellence, not often found in an industry where growth tends to be explosive and economic downturns take their toll on companies not able to weather storms.

Q: A lot of high-tech companies come and go. What's your secret to success?

A: Microway's secret to success is consistency. We provide honest advice on solutions, excellent design, superior tech support, and careful construction and delivery of product. We have done these things consistently for almost 27 years. Several of our employees have been with us for over 20 years.

Q: Where do you see things going in the future?

A: I expect Microway will continue to grow because we service the university, R&D, and financial markets. We do not sell personal computers, but sophisticated computational solutions. In 2001, we purchased a large manufacturing facility to facilitate this growth. Microway owes its growth to the high level of sophistication of its customer base. These are well-educated users of high technology who are fairly immune to empty marketing claims, and very responsive to honesty and price/performance value. It makes for a nice "marriage of convenience" of sorts for both our customers and ourselves.

Interview with Microway's President, Stephen Fried, who holds a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Brown University and is the driving force behind Research and Development.

Q: Can you tell us about your professional achievements previous to Microway?

A: I worked as a Scientist at Avco Everett Research Laboratory essentially doing atomic and laser physics. While there I co-invented the HF chemical laser that the Reagan administration proposed to put into space as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. In 1979, I went to Physical Sciences, Inc. as a Program Manager doing chemical engineering and designing fuel cell power plants. As part of that work I figured out how to speed up calculations on the TRS-80 (the first primitive PCs) by roughly a factor of 10. In 1981, I figured out that another way of doing the same thing - but in a more advanced sort of way - would be to do these same computations on something called a math coprocessor.

Q: What led you to co-found Microway?

A: I had made a proposal at PSI to do some code for the math coprocessors because what I had done was in machine code, and to make it practical you have to be able to do it in higher level languages. They were interested in the idea but basically decided not to do it. We thought it was a good idea as a business concept, so we decided to do it at home in the evenings...We very quickly owned about 80 or 90% of the market share for math coprocessors in PCs because we had the only software. Our software was really very, very good.

Q: What do you think sets Microway apart from the competition?

A: We're a rock solid company; we've been in business for a long time. We know both the software and the hardware side of the business as well as the parallel processing side of the business...The other thing is that we have great tech support and we can execute - which is to say that if we decide to do something and it's possible to do it, we can do it. A lot of people claim they can do it but they never have. Executing on an idea is not as easy as it sounds.

Q:Where do you see the most potential for improvement in high performance computing in the next eighteen months?

A: These are exciting times in our field. Computer scientists today have easy access to 64-bit multi-core processors and high-speed interconnects, including InfiniBand and 10G ethernet. Companies like Mellanox, whose silicon we use in our FasTree switches and TriCom HCAs, are taking connectivity to new heights and quad-core Xeons and Opterons are offering significant increases in compute performance. GPU and RPU/FPGA innovations will offer powerful advances for enterprises and researchers in the near future.