Gridfinity.com - Main: About Us

Company History

In the winter of 2005, co-founders Patrick Donahue and Somboon Chiewcharnpipat joined a financial services firm and began implementing computationally demanding, simulation-driven financial models. Pressed with the need to shorten the run time of their already highly optimized simulations from days (and sometimes weeks) to a matter of hours, they turned to commercial grid offerings from the likes of Sun Microsystems and IBM. These public utility grids were usually adequate in computing power, but difficult to use and almost impossible to automate. Even worse, the high hourly rates quickly drained their computing budgets. Surprised that there were no low-cost commercial grids that harnessed the collaborative power of the idle computers on the Internet, they set out - along with co-founder and grid computing expert Ian Haken - to build just that.

Backed by the aforementioned financial services firm and the power of the Internet community, Gridfinity has the resources to accommodate the needs of any scale company who demands the supercomputing power of grid technology. Up until now, grid computing has only been available at reasonable costs to universities and non-profit organizations, or those companies that can afford to waste money (rare these days) on overpriced and underpowered internal or outsourced solutions. Gridfinity is keenly aware of the need for a better solution that is accessible by everyone.

Founders

Patrick Donahue	Ian Haken	Somboon Chiewcharnpipat

Patrick graduated from Bowdoin College with a degree in computer science and economics and has most recently worked as a software developer for a financial services firm writing highly distributed and optimized simulation-based software. In addition to programming, he has extensive experience in information security and the design of highly available systems and networks.	Ian is currently an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, working towards a double major in computer science and mathematics. Ian has experience in systems engineering and high performance computing, including a summer internship at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, and research in various computationally intensive fields such as computational chemistry, statistical modeling, and network protocol simulation. He has been recognized for his research as a Siemens Westinghouse Competiton Semifinalist and an Intel Science Talent Search Finalist. His experience with supercomputers and computational clusters helped form both the back-end and front-end of the Gridfinity system.	Somboon graduated from Bowdoin College with honors in both mathematics and economics. Previously, he has worked as a quantitative analyst at Sagamore Hill Capital Management, and has most recently worked at the same financial services firm as Patrick, where he designs highly complex and computationally-intensive financial models. He is a past Silver Medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad and Gold Medalist at the Southeast Asian Mathematical Olympiad.