Everything about our company

Our “new” Bug Hunting & Removal Service

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

bugWe recently started a new service, which we were actually doing for years already. You can also learn from this: one can become very experienced in a task and then noticing years later that it can be a service on itself. So starting years agotoday, you can hire us to find all types of bugs – we accept bets.

Hidden bugs

There are many types of bugs that need attention before performance-concerns can even be tackled. Software that works well with a few threads and on small data-sets, can completely burn the computer when scaled up. During our existence we got very experienced as bug-hunters, as each project needed to have this phase. We now have an environment, fully tailored to support bug hunting. We now want to offer this as a separate service.

A selection of common errors we encounter:

  • Reading/writing outside array boundaries.
  • Race conditions.
  • Arithmetic overflow or underflow.
  • Arithmetic precision.
  • Null pointer dereference.
  • Using an uninitialized variable.
  • Resource leaks.
  • etc…

Often related is testability, for which we also have effective solutions for:

  • Randomness in software.
  • Undefined results, which are labelled as “don’t care”.
  • Unknown required precision.

We have the experience and the tools to get many of those error problems tackled and solved. Ask us for more information today to get cleaner and more robust software.

We more than halved the FPGA development time by using OpenCL

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on
fast-fpga
A flying FPGA board

Over the past year we developed and fine-tuned a project setup for FPGA development that is much faster than any other method, including other high-level languages for making FPGA-based systems.

How we did it

OpenCL makes it easy to use the CPU and GPU and their tools. Our CPU and GPU developers would design software with FPGAs in mind, after which the FPGA developer took over and finalised the project. As we have expertise in the very different phases of such project, we could be much more effective than when sticking to traditional methods.

The bonus

It also works on CPU and GPU. It has to be said, that the code hasn’t been fully optimised for CPUs and GPUs – this can be done in a separate project. In case a decision has to be made on which hardware to use, our solution has the least risk and the most answers.

Our Unique Selling Points

For the FPGA market our USPs are clear:

  • We outperform traditional FPGA development companies in time-to-market and price.
  • We can discuss problems on hardware level, software level and algorithm level. This contrasts with traditional FPGA houses, where there are less bridges.
  • Our software also works on CPUs and GPUs for no additional charge.
  • The latencies of the resulting project are very comparable.

We’re confident we can make a difference in the FPGA market. If you want more information or want to discuss, feel free to contact us.

OpenCL in the cloud – API beta launching in a month

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

No_coulds_atmWe’re starting the beta phase of our AMD FirePro based OpenCL cloud services in about a month, to test our API. If you need to have your OpenCL based service online and don’t want to pay hundreds to thousands of euros for GPU-hosting, then this is what you need. We have place for a few others.

The instances are chrooted, not virtualised. The API-calls are protected and potentially some extra calls have to be made to fully lock the GPU to your service. The connection is 100MBit duplex.

Payment is per usage, per second, per GPU and per MB of data – we will be fine-tuning the weights together with our first customers. The costs are capped, to make sure our service will remain cheaper than comparable EC2 instances.

Get in contact today, if you are interested.

StreamComputing is 2 years old! A personal story.

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

More than two years ago, on 13 January 2010, I wrote my first blog-post. Four months later StreamComputing (redacted: rebranded to StreamHPC in 2017) was both official and unknown. I want to share with you my personal story on how I got to start-up this company.

The push-factor

I wanted to create a company which was about innovative projects – something I had hardly encountered until then. The years before I programmed parts of A-to-B-flows, as I call them. That is software that is in the base quite simple, but tediously discussed as very, very complex.

“Complex” software

The complexity is not the software, as you can see. It is undocumented APIs, forgotten knowledge, knowledge in heads of unknown people, bossy and demanding people who friendly ask for last-minute architecture changes, deadlines around promotion-rounds, new deadlines due to board-decisions, people being afraid of getting replaced if the software is finished, jealousy if another team makes version 2 of the software, etc. The rule of office-software is therefore understandable:

Software is either unfinished,
or turned into a platform for unintended functionality.

The fun in office-software is there for analyst, architect or manager – the developer just puts in his earphones and makes all the requested changes (hooray for services like Spotify). But as I did not want to become a manager and wished to keep improving my development skills, I had to conclude I was on the wrong track.

Continue reading “StreamComputing is 2 years old! A personal story.” →

StreamHPC flirts with ARM

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 2 Comments

With the launch of twitter-channel @OpenCLonARM we now officially show a strong interest in ARM for compute. And we are not the only ones, as the twitter already has 80 followers (60 in 1.5 day and 12 retweets of the welcome-message).

ARM has made tremendous progress in both technology and market-share. With ARM-64, companies like NVidia (and maybe AMD) in the field, X86 seems to be getting a real competitor. This could happen because since a few years computers are fast enough and are not being replaced by a faster one, but a smaller one (tablet, phone) or extra one. By the rules of the market, current technologies are replaced by the ones that give those other needs. ARM is fast (enough), flexible in design, very cheap, low-power and passively cooled. The biggest obstacle seems to be only getting a standard for a docking-station to connect your mobile, tablet or watch to keyboard, mouse and large screen.

OpenCL is perfect for ARM, as it gives the computation-power to the intensive computations not already covered by hardware-support. In the world of X86 this interests high performance and big data companies, where on ARM this interests also more. Without the need for OpenCL you can already watch HD video, with OpenCL you can encode the video with MP4. This year you will certainly hear more about new possibilities of OpenCL on ARM.

What do you think. Why does Intel not sell IP to ARM-companies as many technologies could be reused? Could Intel be the next ARM as an IP-seller, or will they stay the defender of X86 for many years to come?

streamhpc.com is not affiliated with ARM.

StreamHPC’s Newsletter

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

stapel_krantenWanting to know what really happens in the world of OpenCL? StreamHPC’s monthly newsletter is the most complete and independent source around the business and techniques around OpenCL. Subscribe, because the written news doesn’t always end up on this blog.

StreamHPC hates spam and will use the subscription-information only for the newsletter.

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I hope you enjoy it!

Happy New Year!

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

About a year ago this site was launched and a half year ago StreamHPC as a company was official for the Chamber of Commerce. It has been a year of hard work, but the reason for this all started after seeing the cover of a book about bore-outs. The result is there with a growing number of visitors from all over the world (from 62 countries since 23-Dec-2010) and new twitter-followers every week. Now some mixed news for 2011:

  • We are soon going to release a few plugins for Eclipse, both free and paid, to simplify your development.
  • 2011 will be the year of hybrid processors (Intel SandyBridge and AMD Fusion), which will make OpenCL much more popular.
  • 2011 is also going to be the year of the smart-phone (prognosis: in 2011 more smart-phones will be sold than PCs). So even more OpenCL-potential.
  • At 31-Dec-2010 we migrated the site to a faster server to reduce waiting-time also online.
  • The book will be released in parts, to avoid more delays.
  • There will be around ten (short) articles published in January. Both developers and managers will be served.
  • Our goal is to expand. We have shown you our vision, but we want to show you more.

In a few words: 2011 is going to be exciting! We wish all our readers, business-partners, friends, family and (new) customers a super-accelerated 2011!

StreamHPC – we accelerate your computations

Thalesians talk – OpenCL in financial computations

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on with 1 Comment

End of October I had a talk for the Thalesians, a group that organises different kind of talks for people working or interested in the financial market. If you live in London, I would certainly recommend you visit one of their talks. But from a personal perspective I had a difficult task: how to make a very diverse public happy? The talks I gave in the past were for a more homogeneous and known public, and now I did not know at all what the level of OpenCL-programming was of the attendants. I chose to give an overview and reserve time for questions.

After starting with some honest remarks about my understanding of the British accent and that I will kill my business for being honest with them, I spoke about 5 subjects. Some of them you might have read here, but not all. You can download the sheets [PDF] via this link: Vincent.Hindriksen.20101027-Thalesians. The below text is to make the sheets more clear, but certainly is not the complete talk. So if you have the feeling I skipped a lot of text, your feeling is right.

Continue reading “Thalesians talk – OpenCL in financial computations” →

Our training concepts for GPGPU

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

It’s almost time for more nerdy stuff we have in the pipe-line, but we’ll keep for some superficial blah for a moment. We concentrate on training (and consultancy). There is a lot of discussion here about “how to design training-programs about difficult concepts for technical people”, or better: “how to learn yourself something difficult”. At the end of this blog, we’ll show you a list how to learn OpenCL yourself, but before that we want to share how we look at training you.

Disclaimer: this blog item is positive about our own training-program for obvious reasons. We are aware people don’t want (too much) spam, so we’ll keep this kind of blogs to the minimum. If you want to tell the world that your training-program is better, first mail us for our international partner-program. If you want the training, come back on 14 June or mail us.

OpenCL and CUDA are not the easiest programming languages due to incomparable concepts in software-land (You can claim Java is “slightly” different). Can the usual ways of training give you the insights and facts you need to know?

Current programs

Most training-programs are vendor-supported. People who follow us on Twitter, know we are not the best supporters of vendor locked products. So lets get a list of a typical vendor-supported training-programs, I would like to talk about:

  • They have to be difficult, so the student accomplishes something.
  • The exam are expensive to demotivate trial-on-error-students.
  • You get an official certificate, which guarantees a income-raise.
  • Books and trainings focus on facts you must learn.
  • It’s very clear what you must learn and what you can skip.

So in short, you chose you wanted to know the material and put a lot of effort in it. You get back more than just the knowledge.

Say you get the opposite:

  • They are easy to accomplish.
  • Exams is an assignment which you only need to finish. You can try endless times.
  • You don’t get a certificate, but you might get feedback and homework for self-study.
  • You get a list of facts you must learn; the concepts are explained to support this.
  • You are free to pick which subject you like.

That sucks! You cannot brag about your accomplishments and after the training you still cannot do anything with it; it will probably take years to actually finish it. So actually it’s very clear why the programs are like this, or can we learn from this opposing list? Just like with everything else, you never have to just copy what’s available but pick out the good parts.

Learning GPGPU

If you want to learn GPGPU, you have to learn (in short) shader-concepts, OpenCL, CUDA and GPU-architectures. What would be needed to learn it, according to us?

  • A specified list of subjects you can check when understood.
  • An insight story of the underlying concepts to better understand the way stream-computing works. Concepts are the base of everything, to actually make it sound simple.
  • Very practical know-how. Such as how to integrate stream-computing-code into your current software.
  • A difficult assignment that gets you in touch with everything you learned. The training gave you the instruments you need to accomplish this step.

So there’s no exam and no certificate; these are secondary reasons for finishing the course. The focus should be getting the brain wrapped around the concepts and getting experience. As the disclaimer warned you, our training-program has a high focus on getting you up-and-running in one day. And you do get a certificate after your assignment gets approved, so bragging is easy.

If you want to learn stream-computing and you won’t use our training-program, what then?

  • Read our blog (RSS) and follow us on Twitter.
  • Make yourself a list of subjects you think you have to learn. Thinking before doing helps in getting a focus.
  • Buy a book. There are many.
  • Play around with existing examples. Try to break it. Example: what happens if the kernel uses more and more local/private memory.
  • Update the list of subjects; the more extensive, the better. Prioritise.
  • Find yourself an assignment. For example: try to compress or decompress a large JPG using OpenCL. If you succeed, get yourself a harder assignment. Do you want to be good or the best?

If you know OpenCL, CUDA is easy to learn! We will have some blogs which support your quest on learning OpenCL, so just start to dig in today and see you next time.

Starting up

Posted by Vincent Hindriksen on

The first steps have been made to create this company. The target is clear: serve customers in the more specialised fields (more than the usual office-applications) where mathematics and metrics are of importance. Most of our customers will have the expertise in a specialised field such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics and need extra power to use/sell their modelling-software.

Hardest target in the current market is finding those customers; since we can provide super-computers and -techniques at a tenth of the price it will be easier than our colleagues in the more expensive segment. Nevertheless the field is and will stay a specialised one.

Target-date is March 2010 to be open for customers. Hard work, but that is what we are made of.