>> Announcer: From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE covering Super Computing '17. Brought to you by Intel. (upbeat techno music) Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado. It's our first trip to the show, 12,000 people, a lot of exciting stuff going on, big iron, big lifting, heavy duty compute. We're excited to have our next guest on. He's Jim Wu, he's the Director of Customer Experience for Falcon Computing. Jim, welcome. Thank you. Good to see you. So, what does Falcon do for people that aren't familiar with the company? Yeah, Falcon Company is in our early stages startup, focus on AVA-based acceleration development. Our vision is to allow software engineers to develop a FPGA-based accelerators, accelerators without FPGA expertise. Right, you just said you closed your B round. So, congratulations on that. >> Jim: Thank you. Yeah, very exciting. So, it's a pretty interesting concept. To really bring the capability to traditional software engineers to program for hardware. That's kind of a new concept. What do you think? 'Cause it brings the power of a hardware system. but the flexibility of a software system. Yeah, so today, to develop FPGA accelerators is very challenging. So, today for the accelerations-based people use very low level language, like a Verilog and the VHDL to develop FPGA accelerators. Which was very time consuming, very labor-intensive. So, our goal is to liberate them to use, C/C++ space design flow to give them an environment that they are familiar with in C/C++. So now not only can they improve their productivity, we also do a lot of automatic organization under the hood, to give them the highest accelerator results. Right, so that really opens up the ecosystem well beyond the relatively small ecosystem that knows how to program their hardware. Definitely, that's what we are hoping to see. We want to the tool in the hands of all software programmers. They can use it in the Cloud. They can use it on premises. Okay. So what's the name of your product? And how does it fit within the stack? I know we've got the Intel microprocessor under the covers, we've got the accelerator, we've got the cards. There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle. >> Jim: Yeah. So where does Falcon fit? So our main product is a compiler, called the Merlin Compiler. >> Jeff: Okay. It's a pure C and the C++ flow that enables software programmers to design APGA-based accelerators without any knowledge of APGA. And it's highly integrated with Intel development tools. So users don't even need to learn anything about the Intel development environment. They can just use their C++ development environment. Then in the end, we give them the host code as well as APGA binaries so they can round on APGA to see a accelerated applications. Okay, and how long has Merlin been GA? Actually, we'll be GA early next year. Early next year. So finishing, doing the final polish here and there. Yes. So in this quarter, we are heavily investing a lot of ease-of-use features. Okay. We have most of the features we want to be in the tool, but we're still lacking a bit in terms of ease-of-use. >> Jeff: Okay. So we are enhancing our report capabilities, we are enhancing our profiling of capabilities. We want to really truly like a traditional C++-based development environment for software application engineers. Okay, that's fine. You want to get it done, right, before you ship it out the door? So you have some Alpha programs going on? Some Beta programs of some really early adopters? Yeah, exactly. So today we provide a 14 day free trial to any customers who are interested. We have it, you can set up your enterprise or you can set up on Cloud. Okay. We provide to where you want your work done. Okay. And so you'll support all the cloud service providers, the big public clouds, all the private clouds. All the traditional data servers as well. Right. So, we are twice already on Aduplas as well as Alibaba Cloud. So we are working on bringing the tool to other public cloud providers as well. Right. So what is some of the early feedback you're getting from some of the people you're talking to? As to where this is going to make the biggest impact. What type of application space has just been waiting for this solution? So our Merlin Compiler is a productivity tool, so any space that FPGA can traditionally play well that's where we want to be there. So like encryption, decryption, video codec, compression, decompression. Those kind of applications are very stable for APGA. Now traditionally they can only be developed by hardware engineers. Now with the Merlin Compiler, all of these software engineers can use the Merlin Compiler to do all of these applications. Okay. And when is the GA getting out, I know it's coming? When is it coming? Approximately So probably first quarter of 2018. Okay, that's just right around the corner. Exactly. Alright, super. And again, a little bit about the company, how many people are you? A little bit of the background on the founders. So we have about 30 employees, at the moment, so we have offices in Santa Clara which is our headquarters. We also have an office in Los Angeles. As well as a Beijing, China. Okay, great. Alright well Jim, thanks for taking a few minutes. We'll be looking for GA in a couple of months and wish you nothing but the best success. Okay, thank you so much, Jeff. Alright, he's Jim Lu I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from supering computing 2017. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)