As of 1 April we are 7 years old. Because of all the jokes on that day, this post is a bit later.
Let me take you through our journey how we grew up from a 1-person company to what we’re now. With pride I can say that (with ups and downs) StreamComputing (now rebranded to StreamHPC) has become a brand that equals to (extremely) fast software, HPC, GPUs and OpenCL.
7 years of changes
Different services
After 7 years it’s also time for changes. Initially we solely worked on OpenCL related services, mostly GPUs. And this is what we’re currently doing:
- HPC GPU computing: OpenCL, CUDA, ROCm.
- Embedded GPU computing: OpenCL, CUDA, RenderScript, Metal.
- Networked FPGA programming: OpenCL.
- GPU-drivers testing and optimisation.
- Software architecture optimisations.
While you see OpenCL a lot, our expertise in vendor-specific CUDA (NVidia), ROCm (AMD), RenderScript (Google) and Metal (Apple) cannot be ignored. Hence the “Performance Engineers” and not “GPU consultants” or “OpenCL programmers”.
From Fixers to Builders and getting new competition
Another change is that we have been going from fixing code afterwards to building software.
This has been a slow process and had to do with the confidence in performance engineering as an expert profession instead of a trick. We’re seeing new companies coming into the market and providing GPU-computing next to their usual services. This is a sign of the market growing up.
We’re confident in growing further in our market, as we have the expertise to design fast software while the newcomers have gained expertise to write code that runs on the GPU with only little speedup.
Community: OpenCL:PRO to OpenCL.org
There have been more times when we wanted to support the community more. The first try was OpenCL:PRO and did not live long, as it was actually unclear to us what “the community” wanted.
In the end it was not that hard. Everybody who starts with OpenCL has the same problems:
- Lack of convenience code, resulting in many, many wrappers and libraries that are incompatible.
- Lack of practice projects.
- Lack of overview on what’s available.
With OpenCL.org we aim to solve these problems together with the community. All is shared on Github and anybody can join to complete the information we’ve shared. While our homepage had around 40 pages on these subjects, it was only our personal view on the subjects or had outdated info.
So we’re going to donate most of the OpenCL-related technical pages we’ve written over the years to the community.
There is much more to share – watch our blog, the OpenCLorg twitter and newsletter!
Different Logo
For who remembered: in 2010 the logo looked quite different. We still use the blocks in the background (like on our Twitter account), but since 2014 the colours and font are quite different. This change has been going along with the company growing up. The old logo is careful, while the new one is bold – now we’re more confident about our expertise and value.
Over the past 3 years the new logo has stayed the same and has fully become our identity.
Same kind of customers
It has been quite a journey! We could not have done it without all the customers we served over those 7 years.
Thank you!
