Leading Innovations in High-Performance GPU Computing

Stream’s founder Vincent Hindriksen had to maintain a piece of software that was often failing to process the daily reports. After documenting the internals and algorithms of the code by interviewing the key people and some reverse engineering, it was a lot easier to create effective solutions for the bugs within the software. After fixing a handful of bugs, there was simply a lot less to do except reading books and playing online games. So why not rewrite the software in full? Three weeks it did not take 2.5 hours anymore to process the data, but 19 seconds. The kick for performance optimization was ignited.

From that bore-out the company was born the next year. There were two options: GPGPU (mostly OpenCL, a hobby) or build smart products for public transport. Two domains were bought, and the choice was made during the year. For the public transport a proof-of-concept was made, but the choice fell for the really difficult work. Not much money was earned that year, and life was tough. The moment the first project was finished, the little government-support had to be paid back as the invoice was sent 2 weeks too early according to the conditions.

A gift of €4000 by Vincent’s grandmother, a landlord who was relaxed with late payments, the trust in the technology by early customers, and late payments to our creditors got us through. Never doing this again!

Growth is hard, really hard. And we learned that, well, the hard way. Several decisions would now be made differently, but we adopted and continued. Some examples: (1) Investing in FPGAs too early. OpenCL-on-FPGAs was the next big thing, so based on what we got promised by vendors, we made the same promises to our customers. Many promises did not turn into reality. (2) Hiring the wrong people. Or: hiring people for whom we are the wrong company, as it goes both ways. We now define our culture, because we want people who fit our culture. (3-20) All the other things that are in the books under “early stage growth”.

We celebrated 15 years for Stream HPC with 25 people.