Mitrionics CEO Details Company Vision

By Christopher Lazou

June 15, 2007

At supercomputing events, the focus in the media is often on large companies, their latest products and their share of the market. The smaller companies and their contribution to product innovation are often ignored in the melee. This year I decided to try and redress the balance a little.

Christopher Lazou: Anders, it's good that you can spare some time to talk to me. As chief executive officer (CEO) of Mitrionics Inc., a company providing ease of use software technology for FPGA supercomputing, you must be an extremely busy man. Let's briefly discuss what is needed to become successful in the HPC space and in the process try to gain some insight into your views concerning FPGAs in future HPC systems.

Why don't you start by telling us who you are and what made you start Mitrionics?

Anders Dellson: Mitrionics Inc. is a Swedish company founded by Stefan Möhl and Pontus Borg, in 2001. I joined the company the year after. When we started, we knew there was a demand for more computing power. We could see then that there was a business opening in this exciting new field of FPGA supercomputing and that more users could benefit from FPGA performance if they were empowered by using a software centric approach when programming the FPGA devices. We came up with a solution that is a massively parallel processor that gets instantiated in FPGA chips. We called our product the Mitrion Virtual Processor. In the last few years, we have found that FPGAs are becoming more widely adopted and the market for our product is growing stronger.

Lazou: How did you and the cofounders of Mitrionics go about financing your vision?

Dellson: We got about $1 million U.S. in 2002 in seed financing from two venture capital (VC) firms, one of them being TeknoSeed, who still owns a part of the company. With that money we completed our first prototype product and got the first pilot customer signed up. Early in 2005, we got $3 million U.S. in VC financing from Creandum, Teknoinvest and TeknoSeed. With that money we focused building up our sales and marketing organization and bringing more customers in. We also developed our turnkey system, initiated the Mitrion-C Open Bio-Project and developed the BLAST-n application. I think that this helped us in attracting the $6 million in financing we received last month, from Grande Ventures, Creandum and Teknoinvest.

Lazou: As we all know HPC is a fast changing field, risky and strewn with failed start-up companies. After six years you are going from strength to strength, so what is the secret of your success?

Dellson: I think the fact that we have had customers giving feedback at a very early stage. We have also been very active in the U.S. market where the largest HPC systems are located, participated in different industry events, etc. In addition, we have great industry partners for example SGI, Cray, DRC and Xilinx. I think the answer is all these reasons together, plus hard work and a strong wish to succeed.

Lazou: The core of your product offering is the Mitrion Virtual Processor, could you explain what 'virtual' in this case means and what it does?

Dellson: The Mitrion Virtual Processor is a processor design. It is massively parallel and configurable. To accelerate an application you re-write the compute intensive parts of your program using our Mitrion-C programming language, which is then compiled into a configuration of the processor and downloaded and run on the target FPGA.

Lazou: You are also talking about FPGAs as enablers of green supercomputing, what exactly do you mean?

Dellson: An important feature of the Mitrion Virtual Processor is the low power consumption compared to regular microprocessors. A typical Mitrion Processor running in a large FPGA consumes a maximum of 25 watts, compared to about 100 watts for a fast microprocessor — and it can do up to 20 times the workload. For the BLAST-n appliance marketed with SGI, the actual power savings over CPU clusters is 95 percent in a sustained operation. This is fantastic for the customers' bottom line costs and for the environment.

Lazou: Who are Mitrionics' principal industry partners and what does this entail?

Dellson: We have industry relationships with Cray, DRC, Nallatech, SGI, Xilinx and XtremeData. Mitrionics works differently with each company. The Mitrion Platform is ported to systems sold by Cray, SGI and Nallatech. We also cooperate in sales and marketing for our products. The modules from DRC and XtremeData will soon also support Mitrion. With Xilinx we have a different agreement. The Mitrion XL is delivered with Xilinx synthesis, place and route tool kit, thus making it easier for the customer. This is not only done for user ease, but is also about marketing FPGA's as accelerators.

Lazou: What successes have you had to-date?

Dellson: There are two that immediately come to mind. One is when the Mitrion Platform was selected by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has the world's largest FPGA supercomputer system based on the Cray XD1. They purchased 36 Mitrion Virtual Processor licenses to accelerate their applications. The second great success was at the supercomputing 2006 show in Tampa, Florida, when Mitrionics and SGI demonstrated an accelerated version of the world's most widely used bioinformatics application, NCBI BLAST, on the Mitrion Virtual Processor and SGI RASC RC100 system. The NCBI BLAST demonstration achieved a 16x performance speedup.

Lazou: What application areas are you concentrating your efforts on?

Dellson: The customer interest in BLAST is huge and it is coming from Europe, the U.S. and from Asia. So I would say that bioinformatics is one of our main focus areas. But we are also looking at suitable applications in other industries with strong potential such as financial, imaging, seismology, and encryption.

Lazou: A sign of success is expansion and Mitrionics is not only hiring new staff in Sweden, but it also started a company in the USA. Could you explain the rationale for this new company?

Dellson: A large share of our business comes from the USA and we need to be able to support them in the best way possible. We have also been able to recruit people with a solid background in the HPC space, which is very valuable to the company at this stage.

Lazou: I understand you are involved in DARPA projects as well as other U.S. defence initiatives. Without revealing any sensitive material do you see a potential for a lot of business in this area?

Dellson: It confirms that we have established ourselves as a major player in the FPGA computing space. We have software development collaboration with Reservoir Laboratories, who were awarded a DARPA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project titled “Productivity Advancements for Configurable Computing”. The project's first phase is for Mitrionics and Reservoir Laboratories to demonstrate productivity enhancements from combining the Mitrionics development platform and Reservoir Laboratories R-Stream compiler.

Lazou: With so much momentum and success in positioning Mitrionics at the centre of the HPC-FPGA evolution, how do you see the development of your software in the near future?

Dellson: Future software developments are to a great extent driven by user needs and the provision of new FPGA hardware. We are working with our industrial partners and plan to enrich the functionality of our products to make porting of applications onto FPGAs even easier.

Lazou: I think we explored a fair number of issues. Thank you Anders, for your time and frank answers. Wishing you all the best for the future and I am sure our readers would find your views very interesting. They also have an opportunity to visit Mitrionics booth at ISC2007, in Dresden so they can talk to your people and of course see a live demonstration of your products in action.

For more information, visit the company website at www.mitrionics.com.

—–

Brands and names are the property of their respective owners. Copyright (C) Christopher Lazou, HiPerCom Consultants, Ltd., UK, June 2007.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire