this was the beta launch, and the first time anyone outside the company had written down what we did in any detail.
the problem we were built around: most supercomputing centers allocate ten percent or less of the machine to development work. if your production run needs thirty thousand cores, you are writing and debugging that code somewhere much smaller and hoping. plenty of organizations have no on-premise cycles for development at all, and anyone evaluating an architecture they do not own yet has nowhere to try it.
what we sold was a functional replica. you develop against an emulation of your target machine's topology and interconnect, at the core count you will actually run on, through a web ide with a parallel debugger attached. it is explicitly not a performance model, since the layers of virtualization mean the timings are not the production timings, but it answers the question that burns allocation: does the code run at scale at all, and how does mpi behave when it does. at launch you could target emulated systems including nscc singapore's aspire-1, or specify a machine that did not exist yet.
łukasz orłowski and i founded it in february 2018, raised a seed round from vcs and angels, and had john gustafson, of gustafson's law, as lead scientific advisor.