PathScale was founded in 2001 as Key Research and its original mission was to develop clustered Linux server solutions based on a low-cost 64-bit design.
The first chief technical officer at PathScale, Tom McWilliams, had the initial idea for the company and incorporated in July 2001.
McWilliams had been a company founder at Valid Logic Systems and Key Computer and worked at SGI, Sun Microsystems and Amdahl Corporation.
[1] A network technology called InfiniPath was marketed as TrueScale by QLogic, and then sold to Intel and became the basis of Omni-Path.
[3] On June 13, 2011, PathScale announced that the EKOPath 4 compiler suite would become open source software and licensed under the GPL.