Start-Up to Discover: A3Cube

A3Cube, Inc., with around 25 employees, is planning to raise financial funding. It was launched in May 2012 after 5 years of stealth mode operations in San Jose, CA by two co-founders being engineers in network and storage with background in HPC:

CEO Antonella Rubicco who previously served as COO and CIO of several corporations and was responsible for a myriad of activities including coordinating analysis, R&D, engineering and marketing of complex projects as well customer and supplier relationships within the HPC hardware and high speed interconnection markets.
Chairman and CTO Emilio Billi who ran his own engineering firm for a decade where he developed the HiDRA personal supercomputer and software suite.

Communication between nodes, that can be comprised of HDDs, SSDs, CPUs and I/O interface, is an essential feature for HPC spending now more time to access than compute data, even using SSDs. The new Californian company, with three patents, is going to complement Ethernet and even IB with its innovative PCIe switching technology called RONNIEE “In Memory Network” with memory-to-memory direct connection and removing TCP/UPD stack, and substituted with a fast memory-to-memory mapped TCP/UDP socket.

This parallel storage architecture is aimed at OEMs and systems integrators for two main applications: 1/ analyst machines like Hadoop and Storm; 2/ high-end parallel NAS.

(Source: A3Cube)

A3Cube’s Full Parallel Scale-OUTpericom

(Source: A3Cube)

It Ronnie Express line includes three products:

Ronnie 2S is a compact PCIe-based network interface card designed to maximize application performance using a combination of hardware and software. This company’s entry-level product combines performance and low latency of PCIe bus with standard computer hardware. The card can reach 80Gb/s of aggregated bandwidth with four external Mini-SAS HD ports capable of running four PCIe x4 Gen 2 links (4 links x 20Gb/s) over Mini-SAS HD cables including FCI Electronics’s Mini-SAS HD active optical – rather than copper – cable supporting reaches up to 100m with a bend radius of 45mm and 3mm wide.
Ronnie Rio is a data fabric designed to deliver performance. The technology presents a scalable interconnection fabric and is based on a patent pending shared memory architecture that implements the concept of distributed non-transparent bridging to extend PCIe features and benefits.
Ronnie 3 is a switch designed to extend the scalability of Ronnie 2S and optimized for high performance data environments. In Memory Network provides support for memory-to-memory transactions without the usual software overhead to achieve unmatched efficiency and performance compared to ordinary interconnection fabrics.

A3Cube claims Ronnie Express technology in an FPGA implementation connects 128 servers with a 100-nanosecond latency.

The firm also developed ByOS that leverages supercomputing’s massively parallel design concepts. It’s a scalable clustered Linux-based OS that offers linear scalability, a distributed front end and a global namespace without any limitations.

At least three other companies are or were involved in PCIe switching: PLX Technology (acquired by Avago), Pericom and defunct StarGen.