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[jski]

Acceleware cuts half its staff

Acceleware cuts half its staff

30 Jul 2008 | 16:05 BST

By Charlie Demerjian

Is GPGPU as lucrative as people think?

ACCELEWARE JUST LET GO half it's staff, starting with President/CEO, Sean Krakiwsky and 39 others including the COO, VP of Business development and the VP of sales. It looks like the CUDA based GPGPU benefits are not quite a bountiful as Nvidia PR says.

The operative quote from the press release here, is "To preserve capital and limit expenditures, the Corporation will reduce the number of personnel to approximately 40 employees", down from about 80. From this point on, "The restructured Corporation will focus its efforts and resources on its more mature vertical markets, including the electronics and oil & gas markets, until additional capital is obtained."

While it is sad to see a promising company like Acceleware implode, it does show exactly what we already knew, CUDA and GPGPU is on it's last legs. That Nvidia has been pouring money into it is a rather transparently desperate attempt to make people believe that it is still worthy. It isn't.

If Acceleware, the big name in the industry, with solid technology, couldn't make the paradigm work, can anyone? Doubtful, but even if they can, it is now quite clear that GPGPU is not the path to riches. It may be an interesting aside, but that is about the limit.

The most interesting part of this is at the top of the release. It says "NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO US NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE US", I wonder why? Almost like someone is trying to keep something out of the press, to use the vernacular, eh? I wonder who would want to keep the biggest proponent of a core technology imploding quiet a few weeks ahead of Nvision?

In the end, there is not much more to say, Google bought Peakstream likely for a song, and now someone will pick up the distressed pieces of Acceleware. They have solid technology, the real question is will anyone actually pay for it when it doesn't make financial sense to use the underlying paradigm? µ

[ryta1203]

I understand how it could not be financially vaible, but to say that it doens't hold the "riches" of computation is a slight overstatement.

It's not the end all be all for every app, but for some apps it makes perfect sense and it very cost effective.

I honestly believe that the biggest hurdles to GPGPU at the moment are not the limits of computation in theory but the GPGPU computational application limits of man and his(her) inability to properly harness the computational power of the GPU.

The average coder is much more interested (lazy) in buying large expensive CPU machines (clusters) and doing some simple MPI or OpenMP where his (her) code doesn't have to change that much and he(she) doesn't have to think around the hardware.

I believe (hope) that there will be significant interest from the business (analyst) sector, hopefully as much as there has been from the academic sector.

GPGPU needs to catch up on the software side. I've just seen too many applications go from CPU code to GPU code and get 20-30+ speedup on the SAME MACHINE just by utlitzing the already existing GPU.

Sometimes, HPC techs do get too overhyped.

While I think that Nvidia's CUDA is a good tool, there is academic opposition to it in places because it is not hardware independent. AMD's Firestream is still too in the "baby" phase to be of any real use and the "academics" who choose to use OpenGL(DX)/SL are fine, but this is not practical for the business world and so I doubt that approach will ever catch on.

This is all, of course, JMO.