Researchers who spent 15 years studying the skeletal remains of “Ardi,” a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago, turned to a specialized software developer in San Clemente, CA, to help them understand how the 110-pound, 4-foot female walked and moved.

Scientific papers about the nearly complete fossilized skeleton that were published this week have set off something of a media sensation over the ancient creature formally known as Ardipithecus ramidus. The discovery extends the fossil record of the human lineage to a point a million years before “Lucy,” the Australopithecus specimen that was the previous record holder. Perhaps more importantly, scientists were surprised to find that the oldest human ancestor walked upright on the ground. Many researchers had previously believed that such an early ancestor would be a “knuckle-walker” that moved about on all fours limbs, like modern chimpanzees.

Knee Simultation

Shawn McGuan, who founded LifeModeler in 2002, tells me he adapted the company’s bio-mechanical visualization software to help anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University to determine how Ardi’s joints fit together, and their range of motion. LifeModeler’s LifeMOD software is used mostly by orthopedic surgeons in computer-based modeling to plan and practice surgeries that replace knees, hips, and other joints.

McGuan says LifeModeler worked with Lovejoy to assemble 3-D images of Ardi’s bones, using the computer-based model to determine how they fit together and where different muscle groups attached to different bones. “Because the simulation is “physics-based,” according to McGuan, it helps researchers deduce what movements Ardi was capable of, based on her anatomy.”

“We sat down with Owen, and put the bones together and laced muscles through the skeleton,” McGuan says. The program also allows the users to pull on various muscles to see how a foot or hand flexed and moved. “We showed the foot can grab branches and also walk efficiently.”

McGuan tells me LifeModeler “has had paying customers from day one.” He self-funded the company, which now has 20 employees, and raised about $2 million last year from investments by high-net-worth individuals and San Diego-based Huntington Capital. He is currently raising another $2 million. In addition to orthopedics and medical applications, McGuan says the modeling software is used by engineers to optimize the performance of golf clubs and other sports and recreational equipment, and by NASA in mission planning (to simulate spacewalk repairs to make sure that astronauts can physically perform certain tasks).

In an email that McGuan sent today to investors and others, he explains, “Our work involved using LifeMOD simulation to recreate ARDI and answer the question: How could a foot which could grasp a branch, also walk efficiently? This is an age-old question that our simulations were able to shed some light on.”

McGuan says the LifeMOD simulation program will also be featured in a one-hour TV special, “Discovering Ardi,” scheduled for 9 p.m., Sunday Oct. 11 on the Discovery Channel.

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Where I grew up in the Midwest in the 1970s and early 80s, Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. Back then, a supercomputer was a top-flight machine that could perform a few hundred million floating point operations per second (”flops”). That was good enough to help scientists do intensive calculations in areas like weather forecasting, climate modeling, and nuclear weapons simulations. Cray’s first supercomputer, the famed Cray-1, was bought by Los Alamos National Laboratory for $8.8 million in 1976; eventually, some 80 of the machines were sold, for $5 million to $8 million a pop.

Today, your average desktop computer is far more powerful than a Cray-1, and so the definition of “supercomputer” keeps changing to keep up with the times. But one thing has not changed. Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) is still a major player in the space, despite a long history of ups and downs. The company, which began in 1972 as Cray Research in Chippewa Falls, WI, was bought by Silicon Graphics in 1996 for $767 million, and then was reborn in Seattle in 2000 following a $50 million merger with Tera Computer (which was renamed Cray). Since then, it has been a long uphill climb to get back near the top of the supercomputing heap against heavyweight competitors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Nobody better to tell that story than Peter Ungaro, the chief executive of Cray. I recently had a chance to speak with Ungaro by phone at his Spokane, WA, office about his company’s strategy and recent history, the technical challenges involved in modern supercomputing, and innovative ways of gaining new customers (how do you sell someone a $10 million machine?). What impressed me was his ability to lay out the financial concerns of his company while also diving deep into the technological aspects of supercomputers—how they will interact with cloud computing, how computational records will continue to be broken, and when computers might exceed all processing capabilities of the human brain.

First off, I wanted to know how Ungaro (left) defines a “supercomputer” these days. Some would say it should be one of the 500 fastest machines in the world. Others would say it’s a machine used for scientific and technical problems that costs more than a certain amount. Ungaro’s definition is simple and focuses on the bottom line. “We like to think of supercomputers as costing more than a million dollars,” he says.

Ungaro, a Washington State University alum, joined Cray in 2003 to run sales and marketing as senior vice president. He had been at IBM for 13 years, most recently running its high performance computing group, a $2 billion business inside Big Blue. Why did he make the jump to Cray? “I really loved the supercomputing space,” Ungaro says. “Customers are doing really interesting things. I really wanted to try and see what a smaller company was like. Even at $2 billion, you’re only 2 percent of IBM’s revenues.” In short, like many entrepreneurs, he wanted to have more impact. “There was no better place to go than Cray. It was a natural move.”

But Cray had its share of problems. The company had struggled to get its next-generation supercomputer product ready, and 2004 was “really rough,” Ungaro says. Cray was losing money and …Next Page »

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Crosscheck Networks of Waltham, MA, said today that it has acquired Forum Systems, also of Waltham. Crosscheck makes a simulation environment that allows software companies to test Web-based applications before they’re deployed; Forum Systems makes a gateway appliance that provides security and authentication services for Web-based software. As a result of the acquisition (the financial terms of which were not disclosed), customers will be able to deploy the Crosscheck and Forum technologies together more easily, the companies said.

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Wilsonville, OR-based Mentor Graphics, which does electronics design and analysis, announced it has acquired the Flomerics Group, a U.K.-based maker of fluid-dynamics simulation software. Flomerics will become the mechanical analysis division within Mentor (NASDAQ: MENT).

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In Boston and Seattle, the professional sports teams aren’t just for entertainment—they’re managed by some of the biggest movers and shakers in the two regions’ high-tech economies. In the Seattle area, the Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers are part of Vulcan Inc., owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The Kraft Group, owner of the New England Patriots, has built one of the NFL’s most advanced websites and has spun off a startup, Matchmine, that’s doing pathbreaking work in the area of online content and shopping recommendations. Many of the Banner 17, the group of financiers that owns the Boston Celtics, are partners at Boston-area venture capital and private equity firms. Over at the Red Sox, pitcher Curt Schilling is the founder of 38 Studios, which is building a massively multiplayer online (MMO) adventure game set to debut in 2011.

And now you can add one more connection between the sports and high-tech worlds. Yesterday marked the public debut of iRacing.com, an Internet-based auto racing simulation system created by John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox and co-owner of Roush (no relation to me) Fenway Racing, and Dave Kaemmer, co-founder of Papyrus Design Group, which developed several of the best known PC racing games, including NASCAR Racing: 2003 Season and Grand Prix Legends. (In 1995 Papyrus became part of Sierra Entertainment, which was long headquartered in Bellevue, WA.)

The Bedford, MA, company has been working on its simulation—which combines PC-based software with a subscription-based Internet service that allows participants to race against each other—since 2004. The company has a staff of 42, half in Bedford and half (primarily digital artists and software engineers) working remotely, according to Scott McKee, iRacing’s vice president of marketing. If you’re familiar with the way most big commercial videogames are developed these days, you’ll realize that 42 is a tiny number; major console and PC games like 2K Boston’s Bioshock or Electronic Arts’ Spore (which comes out September 7) involve hundreds of developers and artists and have Hollywood-scale production and marketing budgets.

But iRacing goes out of its way to explain that its simulation system is not a game, and isn’t being produced or marketed like one. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘game’ is a four-letter word to us, but we don’t think of ourselves as a game company,” says McKee. “What we offer is really the world’s most sophisticated commercially available racing simulation, conceived and designed with a very discriminating customer in mind—professional racers. We want to create a software package that will help them learn new tracks, hone their skills, or knock off the rust if they’ve been out of the car for a while. It’s really a driver development tool.”

McKee says he used iRacing to learn his way around Virginia International Raceway—one of two dozen tracks currently available in the simulation—before going there to participate in an amateur race. “I’d never driven the track before,” McKee says. “I spent about half an hour a day for three weeks driving the sim in a comparable car, and when I got there I was immediately up to speed.” So to speak.

Of course, you don’t have to be a real-world racer to use iRacing.com. On Tuesday, after a month of beta testing and two months in invitation-only mode, the company opened its simulations to anyone 13 or over who has a credit card, a Windows PC (sorry, Mac users), a broadband Internet connection, and a wheel-and-pedal set. (These PC accessories are available from joystick and mouse manufacturers such as Logitech and Microsoft.) Subscriptions cost …Next Page »

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If you’ve spent any time in Second Life—or any other virtual world, for that matter—you know that the serious attractions are on the ground, not in the sky. The sky simply isn’t a priority for most virtual world-builders, who usually have their hands full just simulating players’ avatars and their interactions with virtual objects such as buildings and furniture. The synthetic cumulus clouds of Second Life look like raked-over cotton candy, the sunsets are a wan burnt-orange, and there’s nary a thunderhead, rainbow, or sunbeam to be found.

But Second Life’s weather is about to improve. Linden Lab, the company that launched Second Life in 2003, purchased Waltham-based graphics studio Windward Mark Interactive in May, and will soon integrate that firm’s atmospheric rendering software into its 24/7 online simulation, bringing the sky a new level of realism and spectacle. At the same time, Windward Mark’s five founding programmers—all members of Harvard College’s Class of 2003—are moving into Linden Lab’s new 14th-floor offices at One Broadway, Cambridge.

This Kendall Square location is Linden Lab’s largest major outpost outside its San Francisco office. That means it won’t just be the lead site testing the new weather-modeling system (called WindLight)—it will also be the place where the famed virtual-worlds company explores whether it can, itself, operate virtually. “We see Second Life as a global platform, so we should be a distributed company,” says John Lester, Linden Lab’s Boston operations director and academic programs manager.

I sat down with Lester last week in one of the conference rooms that Linden Lab shares with the dozens of other technology companies renting bays in One Broadway’s busy Cambridge Innovation Center. The view out the windows was of just the sort of breezy, drizzly Boston day that the Windward Mark guys would probably enjoy simulating.

“The sky is never just a static picture,” Lester observes. “The atmosphere is always changing, and causing you to see what’s underneath differently. We want to give our users that kind of control in Second Life. And with WindLight you can change the level of haze, the types of clouds, the rate of the wind. That’s why it was such an effective match to hire these five guys from Windward Mark, who are just brilliant.”

Not long ago, these virtuosos of variation might have been asked to move across the country to work out of the Sansome Street headquarters of Linden Lab—a famously cultish company run by CEO Phillip Rosedale, who frequently proselytizes on the virtues of virtual communities. But Lester, who wears an amulet showing the signature raised-hand Linden Lab logo around his neck, says it’s now time for the company to welcome employees who might prefer to live outside the Bay Area. “We talk the talk about the Metaverse, and being plugged into a global data-space,” says Lester. “Now we want to walk the walk. Instead of all being in the same building in San Francisco, we’ll see the world from more points of view, and we’ll live where we want to live.”

Lester himself is a longtime Bostonian, having joined Linden Lab after a long stint as director of technology for the neurology service at Massachusetts General Hospital. “At MGH I got into how technology could help physicians and patients communicate, particularly patients with chronic incurable illnesses,” Lester recounts. He says he saw the potential for educational and social uses of virtual worlds after watching stroke survivors and people with Asperger’s Syndrome and cerebral palsy begin to flower through their interactions in Second Life. “I decided I saw so much potential for this that I wanted to help make it grow.”

In the Cambridge office, Lester and the Windward Mark programmers will work alongside a representative cross-section of other Linden Lab staffers, including software developers, community managers, business development officers–”the whole nine yards,” in Lester’s words. The weather-simulation experts may even have to get their hands dirty helping to improve the stability of Second Life’s basic simulation software—which, at times, is barely up to the challenge of supporting the tens of thousands of users who are online simultaneously. Just this week, residents have suffered through a series of outages related to a bug in the way Second Life’s simulation servers communicate with the databases that store all information about the world’s contents.

Improvements can’t come too soon for some users, who’d rather have working avatars than beautiful weather. “You need to slow down the development of WindLight, and get some of the people working on that moved onto the problems,” one Second Life user urged last week in a comment on the company’s blog. “Once the asset server does exactly what it’s supposed to 99.99% of the time, then we can talk about pretty skies.”

Like the Cambridge office, the company’s other locations in Seattle, WA, Mountain View, CA, and Brighton, England will have a broad mix of employees working on a range of such challenges—often meeting one another inside the virtual world. “The offices aren’t branches, they are just distributed instances of a single Linden Lab,” says Lester. “Our only central office is Second Life itself.”

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