Dataflow Computing highlights Great Britain’s Tech Prowess

UKTI & Maxeler Technologies Media Release

Hannover, March 13, 2014 – As the UK technology sector cements its leading position in tech innovation worldwide, British firm Maxeler credits its growing success to the innovation of its dataflow engine technology. Dataflow is a highly novel compute concept where applications gain massive performance improvements and power efficiency by exploiting the inherent benefits of spatial programming. Also recently The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and London-based Maxeler Technologies announced their collaboration in a project funded by the UK Department of Business Innovation and Skills to install the next generation of supercomputing technology in a new facility at the Daresbury Laboratory focusing on energy efficient supercomputing and offering orders of magnitude improvement in performance and efficiency to enable UK industry to have the edge in using a technology designed for the move towards Exascale computing.

Earlier this week at the CeBIT IT exhibition, Maxeler, supported by UK Trade & Investment, demonstrated the technology and promoted the spatial programming initiative OpenSPL (www.openspl.org) to British PM David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Oskar Mencer, Maxeler CEO, spoke at length with the two world leaders about the design of dataflow engines and its particular use in the finance industry where stock exchanges and banks employ the engines to accelerate risk analytics in real-time. Dr. Mencer said of the visit, “to have two world leaders visit our company stand and appreciate the significance and opportunity that spatial computing presents was a great honour.” In organising the visit, UKTI Tradeshow Director Ron Archibald said, “UKTI is delighted that Maxeler has exhibited at UK Partner Country at CeBIT. Maxeler has cutting edge technology for handling massive data flows, a subject at the heart of this year’s CeBIT. Maxeler develops and manufactures in London and is a great British success story. UKTI looks forward to working with them on other events to build on their international success.”

Promoting dataflow computing doesn’t stop here, “We know this is a great solution as it’s already deployed in many sectors, including oil & gas and finance. What’s on the horizon is equally exciting too and with the continued support of UKTI we will be able to carry this message forward.” said Glenn Rosenberg, VP of Operations.

STFC Daresbury Laboratory first to install Maximum Performance Computer (MPC)

The dataflow supercomputer will feature Maxeler developed MPC-X nodes capable of an equivalent 8.52TFLOPs per 1U and 8.97 GFLOPs/Watt, a performance per Watt that tops the Green500 today. MPC-X nodes build on the previous generation technology from Maxeler deployed at JP Morgan where real-time risk computation equivalent to 12000 x86 cores was achieved in 40U of dataflow engines (see original news story here).

STFC Technology Division Head, Dr. Peter Oliver said “The use of this technology builds on the expertise of STFC’s Scientific Computing Department and allows us to develop energy efficient high performance computing applications meeting the needs of our academic and industrial collaborators.”

The new MPC-X supercomputer will be available in Summer 2014 and will allow UK industry and academia to develop products and services based on MPC data analytics engines for applications domains such as medical imaging and healthcare data analytics, manufacturing, industrial microscopy, large scale simulations, security, real-time operations risk, and media/entertainment.

Prof. Michael J Flynn, Chairman of Maxeler Technologies and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University said: “Multiscale Dataflow Computing came out of early research funded by the US government and it is exciting to see a first deployment in a national laboratory in the UK. Combined with our collective efforts as part of the OpenSPL consortium, we at Maxeler are excited to see spatial computing at the forefront of next generation computing technology.”

Predictive simulations and analytics are hard and require significant expertise. STFC Applications Performance Engineering Group Leader, Dr Mike Ashworth said: “Ever more accurate prediction capabilities based on advanced data analytics will help the UK to be more aware, and consequently more prepared for the future.”

We live in an Era of Convergence of scientific and commercial computing. Power consumption determines the life of your battery and so makes novel energy efficient applications a necessity in healthcare, entertainment, management of natural resources, and finance.

It is expected that advanced real-time capabilities derived from the dataflow supercomputer will in time help to reduce healthcare expenditure, increase efficiency of manufacturing processes, help with the exploration and management of natural resources and drive the next generation of digital entertainment such as the new 4K video standard.

“Maxeler Technologies is excited and proud to have the opportunity to collaborate in the STFC outreach to industry, ensuring the world-leading position of the UK as a world center of innovation and technological leadership,” said Oskar Mencer, CEO of Maxeler Technologies and Member of Academic Staff at Imperial College London.

Contacts
Dr Stephen Weston
Chief Development Officer (CDO²)
Maxeler Technologies
Tel: 0208 7626196
Email: [email protected]

About Maxeler Technologies

Maxeler Technologies, in the heart of London, provides Multiscale Dataflow Computing Platforms for Data Analytics, Imaging, and Transaction Processing for Oil&Gas, Finance, Science, Security, and Media markets. Maxeler production systems have been powering investment banks, exchanges, Oil exploration, and over 100 university research centers around the world.

Multiscale Dataflow Computing combines maximal compute performance and minimal power consumption to drive mission critical computing and competitive advantage for the end user. For the deployment of multiscale dataflow computing, Maxeler’s installation for credit derivatives received the American Finance Technology Award for ‘Most Innovative IT Initiative’ in 2011 and the Frost&Sullivan European Technology Innovation of the Year Award for Multiscale Dataflow Computing.

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