At the Open Networking Summit 2014 (#ONS2014) there was talk of the future, where data dictates how we live our lives. #theCUBE’s Stu Miniman interviewed Emilio Billi, Founder, Chief Development Officer and Chairman of start-up A3CUBE. A3CUBE is a network ecosystem start-up that aims to extend the connectivity from inside the box. A3CUBE has a personal goal that they want to move the focus from High Performance Computing (HPC) to High Performance Data (HPD) in order to solve tomorrow’s data center challenges.

A product that Billi talked about at length is a variation of the PCIe Express on a Network Interface Card. A3CUBE had been in stealth mode some five years developing this product and others. The variation of the PCIe Express offers lower latency. In conjuction with that initial PCIe Express, the company is promoting their Ronniee Express technology via a PCIe 2.0 driven FPGA to offer sub-microsecond latency across a 128 server cluster. A3Cube’s own website states the fabric uses a combination of hardware and software, while remaining application-transparent. The product combines multiple 20 or 40 Gbit/s channels, with the aim at petabyte-scale Big Data and HPC storage systems.

The gist is pretty simple: TCPP is too high latency and Billi and his team wanted to change transfer media and how you communicate between the servers.

With Ronniee Express you get:

1. Much better latency
2. Much higher performance
3. Not required to change application
4. Technology is transparent to upper layer protocols

Future of HPC is HPD

Billi claims that the environment is fairly scalable too. With only copper currently supported, optical cables will be coming this June allowing for longer cables in the 100 meters range. Currently, A3CUBE can scale a network comfortably by 10,000 nodes or more. The idea behind the architecture was to create a very analytical and parallel storage architecture. Hadoop clusters are the first use case for the environment and Billi reported they are going very well.

Billi said, “We are convinced that in the next year high performance computing will become high performance data. So our lives will become driven by data.”

And that is where the rubber meets the road. In our very data-driven landscape of the future, A3CUBE is aiming to improve the data center by decreasing latency some 5-7x.

“As a company we’d like to be vertical, so we target OEM and system integrators that can provide our solution. Inside there are some market niches that are really perfect for our application. Maybe oil and gas applications for example.”

Billi and A3CUBE want to improve speed throughout all levels of the data center, serving up and down the stack. The traditional supercomputer architectural model is out, thousands of commodity computing elements, creating more affordable and scalable computing systems is in. The new model makes HPC available to a wider range of applications.

Storage systems and data analytic machines must make the same transition from a few high performance storage engines to thousands of networked storage devices operating in parallel to deliver on the promise of real scale out storage. A3CUBE aims to serve that new market needing to make the switch.