Rex Computing Startup to Open Source Parallel CPU

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Neo_CoreOver at EE Times, Rick Merritt writes that a startup founded by two teenagers is designing a parallel processor that it hopes delivers a 10x leap in performance per watt for high-end systems. The company is called Rex Computing, and their ambitions stretch all the way to Exascale.

Rex Computing CEO Thomas Sohmers says he wants to create an alternative to today’s processors and accelerators, which are too power hungry to scale to the exaflop performance researchers hope to deliver in the next decade.

We’ve got a long and difficult road ahead of us as an industry. It’s pretty well accepted, going down the current path with Intel and Nvidia processors following Moore’s Law, that there’s a pretty good chance we won’t get to exascale systems by the current time estimates. So we need something new, and we’re trying to deliver that, but it’s a tough sell. There’s a lot of reluctance to go for something new.

Sohmers was recently elected co-chairman of the high-performance working group under the Open Compute Project (OCP) started by Facebook. He hopes Rex can finish the design of its neo core as early as January and make it open source through the group.

Sohmers also participated in my panel discussion last week at the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14. We hope to have the video from that session posted right here next week.

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