ExpEther Technology - Cost-effective Acceleration Solution For Applications

Yesterday I'd an interesting conversation with Mike, a Mechanical engineer, working in a 3-D printer startup that plans to create mechanical robotic product using a material lighter but tougher than plastics. The startup has already received Series-A funding and one of the biggest airline manufacturer is now keenly watching the developments. Good for them!!!

Challenge - Long and Compute Intensive Simulations

While he was professional enough not to share the product details with me, but we did discuss on how such mechanical systems are made. It turns out that, before making any of this real stuff, the first and the foremost step that they must do is to run simulations. Simulations are software models, running on a computer/server, that can predict the output of a given design based on various input parameters/conditions. For example, in their case, the simulation informs the tensile strength of the chosen material under conditions such as load, temperature, humidity, and many others. But running these simulations, is major challenge. These software models do a lot of numerical analysis, under different inputs conditions, before coming out with the results. So a normal computing desktop machine must be replaced with high-end servers to run such simulations. But then, he is not the only one running such models, there are others in his organization as well. So they must either wait for their turn, in which case productivity goes for a toss, or they must buy even more servers, which means burning cash which is so vital to a startup. 

In fact the problem that Mike faces can be easily generalized. Today, we have businesses working on Virtual Reality applications that need huge graphic processing power for simulations. Similarly, medical analytical software that have to do real-time analytics on high resolution images. Likewise, Surveillance wherein live high resolution video feeds undergo complex image processing for applications such as Crowd Analysis, Face Recognition, and many others. All these applications need huge processing power while working on data at high speeds. And not to forget IoT, wherein tons of data coming from infinite sensors has to be meaningfully understood through analytical software and then possible prediction/AI has to be made and sent to recipient machines. 

To cater such increasing processing demand, we can't just buy more and more servers, when actually what we need are accelerators (Graphic or FPGA) !!!

ExpEther Technology To The Rescue

This is exactly where NEC's Service Acceleration Platform based on ExpEther technology stands out and shows its true prominence. So here's what Mike could do:

1. Get a server - Any small 1U server with 1 PCIe slot is enough
2. Get some accelerator engines for computation, for example GPU or FPGA cards. Get some high speed NVMe storage if required. 
3. Get an off-the-shelf 40G Ethernet switch
4. Bind all these together using NEC's 40G ExpEther HBA and 40G IOBOX

Yes, its that simple!!!

And when Mike's organization requires even greater computation power, they don't need to buy any of #1, #3 and may be even #4 above (depends upon expansion capacity of IOBOX); they just get more accelerator cards and plug them into the platform. Since ExpEther Technology allows for resource sharing and dynamic allocation/reallocation of resources based on application demand, so in Mike's case, he may allocate to use none/some/many or all of accelerators based on his need. And once he's done, all these resources go back to the pool for others to utilize and share. 

The same principle applies to all industries, Medical Analytics, Virtual Reality, Surveillance and Safety, IoT, Big Data Analytics, etc., since accelerator engines and high speed NVMe storage can be added to existing servers, thereby leveraging full use of existing servers.

So if you too are facing similar challenges in your business, get going and ping us to know more about our product and schedule a demo. Also visit our page(https://www.expether.org/index.html) for further details and latest updates on the product.