Federal funds to help Liberty Lake tech company

Liberty Lake technology company Isothermal Systems Research expects two big infusions of federal money will help the company land contracts with its first big commercial customers, the firm’s president said Monday.

ISR President Jeff Severs said the company has landed a significant share of $5.5 million in federal funds set aside to help develop the next generation of supercomputers.

Severs and others gathered Monday morning in the Tri-Cities with U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Spokane. Nethercutt announced that $3 million in the fiscal 2004 budget has been set aside for supercomputer research; most of that money will go to ISR, a private company with offices in Liberty Lake, Pullman and Clarkston, Wash.

Nethercutt noted that another $2 million in the House version of the fiscal 2005 federal budget also has been set aside for such research, but the full budget hasn’t been completed.

ISR, a 70-person company which was launched in the early 1990s, designs high-end cooling technology used to keep electronics and computer circuits from overheating.

Up to now, most of ISR’s $30 million in annual revenue has come from military projects.

The federal money will help move ISR closer to commercial customers that are adopting high-performance supercomputers, said Severs.

“Ironically, ISR got its start developing cooling technology for supercomputers back in 1992,” Severs said. “We’re going back to our roots.”

The federal money will allow ISR to work in collaboration with Tessera Technologies, a Silicon Valley firm. Tessera uses specialized polymer materials in developing computer circuit boards.

Severs said the eventual goal is for commercial sales of ISR technology to account for about half the company’s revenue. “This is the first step in getting us in that direction,” he said.

The bulk of the federal research dollars will be used at ISR, Severs said. “Most of that research money will be going to Liberty Lake with a portion of the work at the Pullman research site,” he said.

Supercomputers are complex systems that link or cluster thousands of processors and hard drives to handle millions of operations per second. Monday’s press gathering about ISR’s federal projects was held at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. The laboratory has the ninth-fastest supercomputer in the world, according to scientists who track the speed and operations of high-end computers.

While most supercomputers are used by universities or national agencies, they’re becoming more widely used in industry. Companies that crunch huge volumes of data, such as oil and gas companies and labs designing cutting-edge drugs, are possible customers, Severs said.

As a first step, ISR has hired a research project manager. ISR also expects a number of other staff positions, including engineers, to be filled this year, Severs said.