The emergence of the Core™Duo processors for the past 2 years has annihilated the race for Ghz that permitted consumers to get a visible performance speedup from their PC running faster applications that directly and freely benefited from the processor performance increase. As a major technological breakthrough, these new multicore processors now require software applications to be adapted to the concurrent execution of parallel processor cores, and this is not quite yet the case!
How to benefit from these new generations of multicore processors that can provide faster execution only when software applications they run are specifically written and developed?
CAPS fills in the gap between hardware and software by offering HMPP™, a unique solution today available to the HPC community, universal whatever the application or the processor are.
An issue often ignored…
As SUN reveals the sources of its SPARC™ processors and as almost no machines or x86 monoprocessors servers exist on the market, applications have not necessarily followed the same evolution.
If having programs that do not run faster on a new generation of PC can be tolerated, it seems unacceptable, and even risky that companies or governmental organizations, research institutes or defense can be delayed because of a conflict between software and hardware.
In compute intensive activities such as oil and gas simulation or real time finance analyses, a nanosecond delay represents too much money or time to be considered so lightly.
6 years of advanced research to come to a unique application…
Since 2002, CAPS has been working on this issue to today release HMPP™ to the HPC market. HMPP™ enables to develop or to adapt software applications to the current and up coming multicore processors.
What are the benefits offered by HMPP™:
• Keep your application portable
• Dynamically adapt to hybrid platforms
• Protect your software investment
…and ready for tomorrow
The more an application can be specialized, the more it can benefit from hybrid architectures that will mix generic and specialized cores. However, protecting software investment by preserving the legacy of software applications is key in such a fast moving industry. HMPP™ is the only solution – for applications developers or computer departments in charge with system migration – that makes possible to deal with these issues.
From the engineering start-up to the rupture innovation…
CAPS was founded in April 2002 by Laurent Bertaux, entrepreneur and engineer specialized in HPC, and François Bodin, Professor at the French INRIA research lab.
After having raised 2.1 million € in October 2007 from the EMERTEC Gestion and SIPAREX Ventures venture capital, CAPS accelerates its marketing and commercial efforts in order to widely deploy its different HMPP™ based solutions.
Stéphane Bihan is now in charge with the CAPS business development and promotes the HMPP™ technology in Europe and US towards the developers but also the constructors.
Co-founder of the company, Stéphane was previously responsible for CAPS software development.
« CAPS and its founders have been working for about 10 years on how to catch the train of this multicore revolution. This technological jump has for now on brought limited execution speedup mainly because the industry is not yet ready, only a few companies have engaged specific development essential to benefit from the acceleration offered by the multicore processors. A second breakthrough is announced with specialized multicore processors, called manycore, that will bring even more potential speedup with the combination of generic cores and specialized cores, and this is where CAPS offers the unique solution to enable application to leverage the computing power of these processors… » declared Stéphane Bihan. « Our HMPP™ solution primarily addresses major companies and research organizations but the need for computing power keeps growing. We are ideally positioned to help the industry with this new challenge… »