Xcelerit

Our tech start-up to watch this week is Xcelerit, a new software spin-out from the Science Foundation Ireland-funded CTVR telecommunications innovation centre at Trinity College Dublin.

The start-up

The start-up, which was co-founded by Hicham Lahlou, has been keeping quiet up to now. Nevertheless, before this week, Xcelerit got a major boost when it won a top European award for most innovative high-performance computing application in Europe. PRACE, which stands for Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, presented the award to Hicham Lahlou at its research competition in Bologna, Italy.

So, what's Xcelerit all about at the time and how did the company manage to spin out from TCD research back in 2010?Lahlou says that the team at CTVR had been working on projects that focused on the design of innovative wireless communications systems."In many of these projects, we needed to push large amounts of data through complex algorithms in the quickest possible time. Conventional single-core chips were not delivering the performance we needed, so we began to investigate a variety of multi-core and specialised hardware, including GPUs, FPGAs, DSPs."He says that such hardware deliver the processing power at the right price, however are very difficult to program. "We realised there was a significant market possibility for a simplified and unified method to leverage the processing power of these platforms for domain specialists in many compute-intensive application areas."Lahlou himself has quite an eclectic background. Born in Morocco, he was educated there and at INSA in Lyon in France. "Afterwards I got some experience in software development in the space sector in French Guiana, I was searching for an opening that would allow me to engage in cutting-edge innovation and that would offer up entrepreneurial opportunities. In other words what brought me to Ireland to work at the CTVR telecommunications centre." He says the environment there meant he had access to all the latest research."We built Xcelerit as a campus spin-out with help from the TCD research and technology office."

So, how many are involved in the start-up team at the minute? "We established with just a handful of people back in 2010," explains Lahlou. "Since at that time, we have been growing, adding people on the sales, software development and business development areas. We are currently recruiting people on the support and sales side in both Ireland and the UK," he adds.He says that the team came up with the name Xcelerit as they wanted to get across the simple idea that they take existing software and make it run much faster - or 'accelerate it', if you will.According to Lahlou, Xcelerit is aiming to make it very easy to leverage the huge compute power of multi-core and GPU hardware. "From a simple generic source code, users can generate highly efficient programs for a variety of target processors."

Right now, Xcelerit is honing in on the financial services area."We believe that there is a huge potential for growth in financial services," he says. Since the start of the financial crisis, he says there has been a huge focus on the calculation of risk in complex scenarios. "Increased regulation means that investment banks are being required to do ever more complex calculations to ensure that they are not over-exposed. According to Lahlou, the start-up's product allows investment banks to easily modify their existing code to achieve 5x, 10x and 100x speedups."Our research has as well a great potential in other verticals just as energy and data analytics."