insideHPC » inside Startups

DSSD is Andy Bechtolsheim’s Secret Chip Startup for Big Data

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:12:17 +0000

Over at GigaOm, GigaStacey writes that the solution for better and faster storage may lie in DSSD, a stealthy chip startup backed by Andy Bechtolsheim. Founded in 2010 by Sun Alums Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, DSSD is trying to build a chip that would improve the performance and reliability of flash memory for high performance computing, newer data analytics, and networking.

My sources tell me the startup is building a new type of chip — they said it’s really a module, not a chip — that combines a small amount of processing power with a lot of densely-packed memory. The module runs a pared-down version of Linux designed for storing information on flash memory, and is aimed at big data and other workloads where reading and writing information to disk bogs down the application. This fits with the expertise of the team, but this is a problem that others are trying to solve as well with faster and cheaper SSDs and targeted software to to optimize the flow of bits to a database. But the proposal here appears to be about designing an operating system that takes advantage of the difference in Flash memory when compared to hard drives to boost I/O.

Read the Full Story.

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Slidecast: MicroPod HPC – Your Personal Parallel Computer

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:25:26 +0000

In this slidecast, Josh Judd from Warp Mechanics describes MicroPod HPC initiative. Currently a Kickstarter project, MicroPod HPC will enable users to “stand up” a parallel computer using inexpensive commodity hardware, or even use the images as VMs to run a completely virtual development environment.

The MicroPod HPC is a parallel computer that you can afford to use at home. You can “stand up” a parallel computer using inexpensive commodity hardware, or even use the images as VMs to run a completely virtual development environment. The intent is to provide a turn-key framework for R&D of parallel software, and to use as a learning tool.”

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Download the Slides * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

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Crowdsourcing HPC: Kickstarter Project to Build GPU Nodes to Advance Science

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:02:04 +0000

In our second story on crowdsourced HPC this week, Dean Sheaffer describes the Computing for the Advancement of Science Kickstarter project, which aims to leverage Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing (BOINC) platform.

Donors will help fund five (5) PC platforms designed to run just the BOINC client — 24/7/365. One of the nuances of the BOINC client is that it utilizes CUDA processing cores native to modern graphics cards. With four advanced graphic cards (each with 1,500+ CUDA cores) multiplied by the five PC Platforms, a total of 30,000 CUDA cores will be dedicated to advancing the scientific projects — All day, every day.

Read the Full Story.

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Podcast: Ironstone VC Fund Using Data Science to Pick Disruptive Startups

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:54:59 +0000

Can Big Data analytics be used to predict which Startup companies will succeed? In this video, Thomas Thurston from Growth Science discusses the new Ironstone Venture Capital Fund, which is using Business Model Simulation to choose disruptive Startups.

The human mind is good at some things but bad at others. So we use data science and technology to help our brains with the things they weren’t designed for. This marriage between technology and the brain has allowed us to predict business behavior in ways that weren’t possible even a decade ago. It’s the future of venture capital,” said Thomas Thurston from Growth Science. “This fund is unique. First, instead of mostly using intuition, like most VCs do, we’re using powerful, proven data science to identify disruptive companies. That’s revolutionary. Second, we’re interested in seed- and early-stage companies, which is much needed as our economy rebuilds itself. Finally, unlike a lot of VCs focused on exits and quickly ‘flipping’ startups, we have a long-term view and really want to partner with people growing strong, disruptive, meaningful businesses to make the world a better place.”

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

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MicroPod Kickstarter Campaign Aims to Bring Parallel Computing to the People

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:00:29 +0000

A new Kickstarter project is looking to build a parallel computer that you can afford to use at home. With the MicroPod, you will be able to “stand up” a parallel computer using inexpensive commodity hardware, or even use the images as VMs to run a completely virtual development environment.

Completing this project will dramatically expand the number of people who have access to basic parallel computing systems, which in turn will expand the number of people who know how to program and operate these systems. That, in turn, will allow more super computers to be built. This is important. The rate of scientific progress world wide is largely limited by the number and speed of super computers that scientists can access. All of the “big science” problems these days have to be modeled and analyzed by such machines, and there just aren’t enough to go around.

This is a very worthwhile cause and we at insideHPC are hoping you can help them out. Read the Full Story.

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Inktank Startup Partners to Bring Infinite Storage to the Cloud

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:19:11 +0000

Today the Inktank Startup announced a partnership with Canonical to integrate Ceph distributed storage into the next version of Ubuntu 12.10 to be released on the 18th of October. According to the company, Ceph can now be quickly provisioned via a Charm in Juju, Canonical’s open-source service orchestration management tool, making it easier than ever for Ubuntu users to utilize Ceph storage.

The Ceph project combined with Ubuntu, the proven cloud OS, is helping solve one of the biggest challenges in computing today by delivering cloud storage that is infinitely scalable, while being flexible and self-managing,” commented Kyle MacDonald, VP of Cloud at Canonical. ”We see a lot of interest for Ceph, because as a storage backend for OpenStack Volume (Cinder) it can scale easily and provides the needed redundancy to keep the data safe. Canonical has partnered with Inktank to offer enterprise support for Ceph, as well as to provide multiple provisioning options to ensure the storage solution is easy to deploy across different environments.”

Read the Full Story. In related news, Inktank also announced a partnership to integrate Ceph with Metacloud’s enterprise-class OpenStack-based private clouds.

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CPUsage Startup Harvests Your Wasted Cycles for Profit

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:23:39 +0000

Over at Digital Trends, Molly McHugh writes that Portland Startup CPUsage pays users for their wasted CPU power and redistributes to companies with high performance needs.

The idea is that there are so many computers around the world that sit idle most of the day,” says co-founder Jeff Martens. “In the U.S. alone, there are 250 million PCs – and most of us let those computers sit idle most of the time. And even when we do use them, the average person is using about five percent or less of the CPU’s capabilities. We harness that unused processing power and we repurpose it and sell it to companies with high through-put and high performance needs.”

At the moment, the company is gaining traction in the area of video encoding and has raised a $1 million seed round led by Bay Area investors. Read the Full Story.

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Adaptive Computing Invites Tech Entrepreneurs to Pitch Their Startup at SC12

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:44:24 +0000

Adaptive Computing, the largest provider of private cloud management and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workload management software, today announced a call for participants for the 2012 Inside-Startups Pitchfest. The event will be held on November 12th in Provo, Utah, in conjunction with SC12 supercomputing conference. The conference brings together leading investment, editorial and analyst professionals in the high-performance computing industry to foster entrepreneurship in the technical community.

The top minds in high performance computing are coming to town for the SC12 conference,” said Rich Brueckner from inside-Startups. “These folks work with the world’s fastest supercomputers, software, and high-speed networks to advance science and engineering. With that kind of thought leadership so close by, what better place could there be for an innovators’ competition than Salt Lake City?”

Entrepreneurs who attend the Pitchfest will have the unique opportunity to gain exposure through the Inside Startups group, which maintains several publications in the high-tech industry such as Inside Cloud and Inside HPC. Entrants will be judged by a panel of experts with decades of business experience in the high-tech industry, with diverse backgrounds including experience in cloud computing, Internet infrastructure, high-performance computing, data analysis and strategic business development. All participants will be interviewed by members of the press and one winner at the Pitchfest event will receive additional promotion in Inside Startups publications, as well as banner ads and a podcast to promote their business.

We’re excited to be a part of this year’s SC conference in Salt Lake City,” said Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “Because entrepreneurship is at the heart of our own business, we are committed to supporting today’s most innovative up-and-comers to foster progress in HPC and other high-tech areas.”

To learn more about the event, visit the inside-Startups Pitchfest page. To apply for Pitchfest 2012, interested individuals should submit a one-page description of their startup to pitchfest@insideHPC.com.

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Slidecast: Bina – Accelerating Genomics & Data-Driven Healthcare

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:22:37 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPF2ZJDrS-c

In this slidecast, Narges Bani Asadi from a new Startup called Bina presents: Bina – Accelerating Data-Driven Healthcare.

In 2008, a renowned team of researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley came together to solve a critical problem for cancer researchers who were severely constrained by their existing computing capabilities for large-scale data analysis. Through this work they created a new approach to the integrated co-development of statistical algorithms, software and hardware for high performance data analysis. The result was a dramatic improvement in the accuracy, computational efficiency and cost of data analysis. The team founded Bina Technologies in 2010 to bring this approach to market.”

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download from this Google page.

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HPC Startup Silicon Wolves Moves on up to SUNY Incubator

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:16:55 +0000

Today the SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubator announced that the Silicon Wolves Computing Society (SWCS) will be joining their incubator program. SWCS is a consumer-friendly high-performance computing system developer and manufacturer of the most advanced workstations and computer gaming solutions on the market. The high-tech start-up company recently relocated to the Incubator from Anaheim, Calif.

We are thrilled to be in Dunkirk and affiliated with SUNY Fredonia through the Technology Incubator,” said Ryan Wolf, President of SWCS LLC. “This is a great community, and a renowned university and we are excited about our opportunities for growth.”

SWCS is a computing solutions manufacturer and integrator that conduct research and development in highly specialized computer workstations, desktops, laptops and servers, and in particular, develop and configure dedicated computing solutions for Cloud, Virtualization, HPC and Reconfigurable Computing environments.

The Incubator is all about attracting companies which are poised for substantial growth, and helping them through the process while providing them access to the resources that a nearly 6,000-student institution like SUNY Fredonia can provide,” said Robert Fritzinger, Director of the Technology Incubator. “I see a strong fit between Silicon Wolves Computing Society, the SUNY Fredonia campus, and the Incubator and I am anticipating a successful partnership.”

Read the Full Story.

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The Schwartz is Back – This Week on inside* Publications

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:06:54 +0000

In case you missed them, here are a couple of highlights our other inside* publications this week:

Guest Feature: Thinking about Big Data on the Eve of the Spring Trade Show Season. Kevin Dudak, our new guest columnist from Spectra Logic has his eye on the changing landscape in Big Data.

Slidecast: SnapLogic – Simplified & Cost Effective Cloud Integration Platform. Scott Edgington from SnapLogic presents an overview of the company’s cloud integration platform. SnapLogic is the only cloud integration solution built on modern web standards and “containerized” Snaps, allowing you to easily connect any combination of Cloud, SaaS or On-premise applications and data sources.

Video: CareZone Startup Lead by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz Helps You Care for Family Members. The Schwartz is back! Robert Scoble interviews Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer of CareZone. The company provides a safe, private place to organize, store and manage everything associated with caring for a family member.

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ISC’12 Looks to Showcase More HPC Startups

Ralph — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:39:55 +0000

ISC’12 has a few slots left for Startups at their exhibition. The event runs June 17-20 in Hamburg.

Once again, ISC will give young HPC companies the opportunity to participate in the exhibition and introduce themselves to the HPC community. Selected start-ups will receive furnished booth space, a speaking slot, access to the press and much more for a minimal fee. As the application will go through a selection process, interested parties are encouraged to apply directly to Ms. Krasimira Todorova by February 29, 2012. The e-mail should contain the name of the company, year it was established and a short abstract of what you would like to present at the exhibition.

Here’s you chance to show your wares to some of the top minds in high performance computing. We’ll see you in Hamburg!

The post ISC’12 Looks to Showcase More HPC Startups appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel Kicks Dough to Cloud, Analytics Startups

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:00:39 +0000

By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Get more from this author

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the supplier of chips for most of the world’s PCs and servers, is spreading around some of its vast wealth once again, trying to seed the applications that will ultimately drive its processor, chipset, and networking businesses.

The latest batch of dough that Intel Capital is investing in startups comes to over $24m, which is being shared by five companies that are getting their first fix of Intel cashish and two others who are coming back for. While Intel’s backing doesn’t ensure success in the software racket, Intel Capital, which has been around since 1991, has backed some pretty good horses, including Linux distributors Red Hat and SUSE, middleware maker JBoss (now part of Red Hat), database maker MySQL (part of Oracle these days), and Zend Technologies (amazingly, still not eaten).

Intel has invested over $10bn in 1,140 companies in those twenty years, with 191 of the companies going public and another 268 being acquired. Last year, Intel pumped $327m, in 119 different firms.

Revolution Analytics, which has commercialized the open source R statistical analysis programming language and goosed it with closed source extensions, came out of stealth mode in May 2010, but Intel kicked in an unspecified amount of Series A funding two years earlier, which was followed up with a $9m second round from Intel Capital and North Bridge Venture Partners in October 2009.

This second round was extended with another $8.6m a year later, and now Intel Capital is putting yet more money into the R specialists. Intel and did not specify how much money it invested in Revolution Analytics this time around and did not return calls for details at press time.

Gaikai, a cloud gaming company that streams 3D video games to Web browsers, also got some Intel cash. Back in July, Gaikai raised $30m in its third round of funding (which Intel participated in and is announcing today), bringing its total haul to $45m. Benchmark Capital is also an investor.

New to the Intel largesse are: DynamicOps, a maker of cloud automation tools; Guavus, which has created real-time analytics for service providers; IP Commerce, which peddles a platform as a service for e-commerce; Swrve New Media, which does social game analytics to help game coders make those games more interesting; and enLighted, which has created software to manage building lighting. ®

This article originally appeared in The Register. It appears here in its entirety as part of a cross-publishing agreement.

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Video: CPusage Sells Your CPU Cycles to Science

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:17:18 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WaepTTANew

The Next Web brings us this video on CPusage, a Portland Startup that turns your excess CPU cycles into a public grid for scientific research.

The processing power of the idle computers (downloaded in one click for users) creates CPUsage’s Cirrus Grid which delivers a scalable and high powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service for high throughput and high performance computing. Good for SaaS and PaaS offerings, Cirrus Grid provides access to the raw processing power of thousands of physical nodes and is highly secure and able to run most batch-oriented applications and the libraries they require.

Read the Full Story.

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GPU.NET Version 2 Allows Developers to Code in Any .NET-Supported Language

Ralph — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:28:14 +0000

This week TidePowerd announced the Version 2 release of their GPU computing solution for the .NET framework, GPU.NET. The platform allows developers to quickly write GPU-accelerated applications completely in .NET-based languages.

Our core goal is to provide developers with powerful, yet easy-to-use tools for numerical and high-performance computing (HPC) – and to provide those tools with the best value and technical support possible. To this end, we’ve created GPU.NET, a system that allows developers to write their GPU code in any .NET-supported language (e.g., C#, F#, IronPython). GPU.NET opens up the exciting world of GPU computing to millions of new developers worldwide, and we hope it will help to make GPU computing more popular than ever before.

GPU.NET Verson 2 is now available for download.

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Off the Wire: insideHPC Launches inside-STARTUPs.com

RichB — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:10:44 +0000

This week insideHPC, the Web’s premier short-format HPC news site, announced the launch of inside-STARTUPs.com, a sub-site of insideHPC that will extend the site’s coverage to include news on startup companies and profiles of the innovators and entrepreneurs behind them. With more than 850,000 unique page views per month, insideHPC has become a trusted destination for supercomputing news. The addition of inside-STARTUPs, with a focus on those taking advantage of HPC to invent their businesses, will significantly expand and strengthen the site’s content offerings for its core audience of high performance computing professionals.

“As a smaller company, we have to focus our marketing efforts to be more productive and efficient at generating interest,” said Joe Landman, CEO of Scalable Informatics. “Since our advertising efforts began on insideHPC, we were pleased to discover that some of our best and most frequent customers are readers of insideHPC. This publication has allowed us to more efficiently communicate with our intended market. Now that the team at insideHPC are branching out with inside-STARTUPs, we’re looking forward to reaching a whole new set of potential customers who could benefit from our scalable storage solutions.”

Read the Full Story.

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Slidecast: IO Turbine Launches Accelio SSD Accelerator for Virtualization

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:14:04 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO0q_3zYRRw

In this slidecast, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC interviews IO Turbine CEO Rich Boberg. The company’s newest product, Accelio uses SSD/Flash on the compute server to solve I/O bottleneck problems in VMware environments. When installed on VMware servers, Accelio transparently identifies the highest priority data and offloads IOPS from primary storage to Flash, delivering performance directly to designated virtual machines.

Read and write caching can substantially improve VM performance and increase consolidation densities for both virtual server and virtual desktop workloads,” said Chris Wolf, Research Vice President, Gartner. “Storage I/O acceleration in virtual environments is not a checkbox. Significant variations exist among solutions that tightly integrate with the hypervisor and those that run as bolt-on appliances. Integration capabilities, performance overhead, and acceleration granularity are all important considerations when evaluating solutions that work to solve increasingly critical I/O caching and acceleration requirements.”

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Announcing inside-STARTUPs: Our New Sister-Publication

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:51:03 +0000

Clipped from: inside-startups.com (share this clip)

I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new sister-publication: inside-STARTUPs.com. And that’s right, there is a hyphen in the URL between inside and startups.

Let’s Get it Started!

Last year at the GTC conference, we noticed that a lot of interesting startup companies were out there that just didn’t fit under the category of high performance computing. Enter inside-STARTUPS: News for Tomorrow’s Entrepreneur. While there will be some overlap with insideHPC, at inside-STARTUPS, we’re not just interested in tech companies. In fact, Since Web 2.0 has plenty of coverage out there, we plan to focus on firms that make things and provide services.

To kick things off this week, inside-STARTUPs is streaming the TechCrunch Disrupt show live from New York. Like insideHPC, the new inside-STARTUPs will have fresh content every day, so we hope you’ll check it out and visit often!

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Startup to Develop Big Apps for Big Data

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:19:18 +0000

GigaStacey writes about a new startup called nPario founded on the notion that scalable columnar databases are going to be needed to derive value from the Big Data we keep accumulating.

How would this work? In one cited example that sounds like a scene from Minority Report, nPario’s product for marketers takes in an array of demographics, web surfing history, and even IP addresses to serve up custom advertisements made just for your consumer DNA.

People are enamored by big data, but the next thing that happens is companies spend money storing it and looking for the big apps,” said nPario President and CEO Bassel Ojjeh. “If you can’t build scalable apps, then it doesn’t really matter. Your back is against the wall and the big apps have to follow the big data very quickly: otherwise it becomes a mirage of value.”

Read the Full Story.

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Slidecast: Cycle Cloud HPC Clusters – 10,000 Cores in 45 Minutes

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:15:43 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiwRS_E-uhg

In this slidecast, Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe describes how the company provisioned a 10,000-core, top 114-equivalent supercomputer utilizing its CycleCloud service.

Since 2005, Cycle has helped clients maximize the world’s compute resources through its reliable, secure and elastic high performance computing (HPC) solutions, both internally and in the cloud. CycleCloud massively scaled up client resources to perform hundreds of thousands of computational tests in a matter of eight hours. Once the results were produced, the customer could just “turn off” those resources with no further charges. Additionally, the 10,000-core cluster was run on a cost of only $1,060/hour. Leveraging CycleCloud and Cycle’s HPC proficiency delivered these stats:

Infrastructure: 1250 instances with 8-core / 7-GB RAM

Cluster Size: 10,000 cores, 8.75 TB RAM, 2 PB of disk space total

Scale: Comparable to #114 of Top 500 Supercomputer list

Security: Engineered with HTTPS & 128/256-bit AES encryption

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe on other podcast players

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