>> [Announcer] On Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE,
covering SuperComputing '17,
brought to you by Intel.
>> Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're in Denver, Colorado
at this SuperComputing conference 2017.
I think there's 12,000 people.
Our first time being here is pretty amazing.
A lot of academics, a lot of conversations about space
and genomes and you know, heavy-lifting computing stuff.
It's fun to be here, and we're really excited.
Our next guest, Karsten Ronner.
He's the CEO of Swarm64.
So Karsten, great to see you.
>> Yeah, thank you very much for this opportunity.
>> Absolutely.
So for people that aren't familiar
with Swarm64, give us kind of the quick eye-level.
>> Yeah.
Well, in a nutshell, Swarm64 is accelerating
relational databases, and we allow them to ingest data
so much faster, 50 times faster than a relational database.
And we can also then query that data
10, 20 times faster than relational database.
And that is very important for many new applications in IoT
and in netbanking and in finance,
and so on.
>> So you're in a good space.
So beyond just general or better performance,
faster, faster, faster, you know,
we're seeing all these movements now in
real-time analytics and real-time applications, which is
only going to get crazier with IoT and Internet of Things.
So how do you do this?
Where do you do this?
What are some of the examples you could share with us?
>> Yeah, so all our solution is a combination of
a software wrapper that attaches
our solution to existing databases.
And inside, there's an FPGA from Intel, the Arria 10.
And we are combining both, such that
they actually plug into standard interfaces
of existing databases, like in PostgreSQL,
Foreign Data Wrappers, the storage engine in MySQL,
and MariaDB and so on.
And with that mechanism, we ensure that the database,
the application doesn't see us.
For the application, there's just fast database
but we're invisible and also the functionality of
the database remains what it was.
That's the net of what we're doing.
>> So that's so important because we talked a little bit
about offline, you said you had a banking customer
that said they have every database that's ever been created.
They've been buying them all along so they've got
embedded systems, you can't just rip and replace.
You have to work with existing infrastructure.
At the same time, they want to go faster.
>> Yeah, absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
And there's a huge code base, which has been verified,
which has been debugged, and in banking, it's also
about compliance so you can't just rip out
your old code base and do something new,
because again, you would have to go through compliance.
Therefore, customers really, really, really want
their existing databases faster.
>> Right.
Now the other interesting part, and we've talked
to some of the other Intel execs, is kind of this
combination hybrid of the Hardware Software Solution
in the FPGA, and you're really opening up an ecosystem
for people to build more software-based solutions
that leverage that combination of
the hardware software power.
Where do you see that kind of evolving?
How's that going to help your company?
>> Yeah.
We are a little bit unique in that we are hiding
that FPGA from the user, and we're not exposing it.
Many people, actually, many applications expose it
to the user, but apart from that,
we are benefiting a lot from what Intel is doing.
Intel is providing the entire environment,
including virtualization, all those things that help us
then to be able to get into Cloud service providers or into
proprietary virtualized environments and things like that.
So it is really a very close cooperation with Intel
that helps us and enables us to do what we're doing.
>> Okay.
And I'm curious because you spend a lot of time
with customers, you said a lot of legacy customers.
So as they see the challenges of this new
real-time environment, what are some of their concerns,
what are some of the things that they're excited that
they can do now with real-time,
versus bash and data lake.
And I think it's always funny, right?
We used to make decisions based on
stuff that happened in the past.
And we're kind of querying now really the desires
just to make action on stuff that's happening now,
it's a fundamentally different way to address a problem.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And a very, very key element of our solution is that
we can not only insert
these very, very large amounts of
data that also other solutions can do,
massively parallel solutions, streaming solutions,
you know them all.
They can do that too.
However, the difference is that we can make
that data available within less than 10 microseconds.
>> [Jeff] 10 microseconds?
>> So dataset arrives within less than 10 microseconds,
that dataset is part of the next query and that is
a game changer.
That allows you to do controlled loop
processing of data in machine-to-machine environments,
and autonomous, for autonomous applications and
all those solutions where you just can't wait.
If your car is driving down the street, you better know
what has happened, right?
And you can react to it.
As an example, it could be a robot in a plant or things
like that, where you really want to react immediately.
>> I'm curious as to the kind of value unlocking that
that provides to those old applications that were
working with what they think is an old database.
Now, you said, you know, you're accelerating it.
To the application, it looks just the same
as it looked before.
How does that change those performances of
those applications?
I would imagine there's a whole
other layer of value unlocking in those
entrenched applications with this vast data.
>> Yeah.
That is actually true, and it's on a business level,
the applications enable customers to do things they were not
capable of doing before, and
look for example in finance.
If you can analyze the market data much quicker,
if you can analyze past trades much quicker,
then obviously you're generating value for the firm
because you can react to market trends more accurately,
you can mirror them in a more tighter fashion,
and if you can do that, then you can
reduce the margin of error with which
you're estimating what's happening,
and all of that is money.
It's really pure money
in the bank account of the customer, so to speak.
>> Right.
And the other big trend we talked about,
besides faster, is you know, sampling versus not sampling.
In the old days, we sampled old data and made decisions.
Now we don't want to sample, we want all of the data,
we want to make decisions on all the data, so again
that's opening up another level of application performance
because it's all the data, not a sample.
>> For sure.
Because before, you were aggregating.
When you aggregate, you reduce the amount of
information available.
Now, of course, when you have the
full set of information available, your decision-making
is just so much smarter.
And that's what we're enabling.
>> And it's funny because in finance, you mentioned
a couple of times, they've been doing that forever, right.
The value of a few units of time, however small,
is tremendous, but now we're seeing it in other industries
as well that realize the value of real-time, aggregated,
streaming data versus a sampling of old.
Really opens up new types of opportunities.
>> Absolutely, yes, yes.
Yeah, finance, as I mentioned
is an example, but then also IoT, machine-to-machine
communication, everything which is real-time,
logging, data logging, security and network monitoring.
If you want to really understand what's flowing through
your network, is there anything malicious, is there
any actor on my network that should not be there?
And you want to react so quickly that you can prevent
that bad actor from doing anything to your data,
this is where we come in.
>> Right.
And security's so big, right?
It in everywhere.
Especially with IoT and machine learning.
>> Absolutely.
>> All right, Karsten, I'm going to put you on the spot.
So we're November 2017, hard to believe.
As you look forward to 2018,
what are some of your priorities?
If we're standing here next year, at SuperComputing 2018,
what are we going to be talking about?
>> Okay, what we're going to talk about really is that
we will, right now we're accelerating
single-server solutions
and we are working very, very hard on
massively parallel systems, while retaining
the real-time components.
So we will not only then accelerate
a single server,
by then, allowing horizontal scaling,
we will then bring a completely new level of
analytics performance to customers.
So that's what I'm happy to talk to you about next year.
>> All right, we'll see you next year, I think it's in Texas.
>> Wonderful, yeah, great.
>> So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you.
>> He's Karsten, I'm Jeff.
You're watching TheCUBE,
from SuperComputing 2017.
Thanks for watching.