>> 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)

(lively techno music) >> Hello, everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here in Palo Alto to showcase a brand new relationship and technology partnership and technology showcase. We're here with Niel Viljoen, who's the CEO of Netronome. Did I get that right? (Niel mumbles) Almost think that I will let you say it, and Nick McKeown, who's Chief Scientist and Chairman and the co-founder Barefoot Networks. Guys, welcome to the conversation. Obviously, a lot going on in the industry. We're seeing massive change in the industry. Certainly, digital transmissions, the buzzword the analysts all use, but, really, what that means is the entire end-to-end digital space, with networks all the way to the applications are completely transforming. Network transformation is not just moving packets around, it's wireless, it's content, it's everything in between that makes it all work. So let's talk about that, and let's talk about your companies. Niel, talk about your company, what you guys do, Netronome and Nick, same for you, for Barefoot. Start with you guys. >> So as Netronome, our core focus lies around SmartNICs. What we mean by that, these are elements that go into the network servers, which in this sort of cloud and NFV world, gets used for a lot of network services, and that's our area of focus. >> Barefoot is trying to make switches that were previously fixed function, turning them into something that those who own and operate networks can program them for themselves to customize them or add new features or protocols that they need to support. >> And Barefoot, you're walking in the park, you don't want to step in any glass, and get a cut, and I like that, love the name of the company, but brings out the real issue of getting this I/O world if there were NICs, it throws back the old school mindset of just network cards and servers, but if you take that out on the Internet now, that is the I/O channel engine, real time, it's certainly a big part of the edge device, whether that's a human or device, IoT to mobile, and then moving it across the network, and by the way, there's multiple networks, so is this kind of where you guys are showcasing your capabilities? >> So, fundamentally, you need both sides of the line, if I could put it that way, so we, on the server side, and specifically, also giving visibility between virtual machines to virtual machines, also called VNFs to VNFs in a service chaining mechanism, which has what a lot of the NFV customers are deploying today. >> Really, as the entire infrastructure upon which these services are delivered, as that moves into software, and more of it is created by those who own and operate these services for themselves, they either create it, commission it, buy it, download it, and then modify it to best meet their needs. That's true whether it's in the network interface portion, whether it's in the switch, and they've seen it happen in the control plane, and now it's moving down so that they can define all the way down to how packets are processed in the NIC and in the switches, and when they do that, they can then add in their ability to see what's going on in ways that they've never been able to do before, so we really think of ourselves as providing that programmability and that flexibility down, all the way to the way that the packets are processed. >> And what's the impact, Nick, talk about the impact then take us through like an example. You guys are showcasing your capabilities to the world, and so what's the impact and give us an example of what the benefit would be. I mean, what goes on like this instrumentation, certainly, everyone wants to instrument everything. >> Niel: Yes. >> Nick: Yeah. >> But what's the practical benefit. I mean who wins from this and what's the real impact? >> Well, you know, in days gone by, if you're a service provider providing services to your customers, then you would typically do this out of vertically integrated pieces of equipment that you get from equipment vendors. It's closed, it's proprietary, they have their own sort of NetFlow, sFlow, whatever the mechanism that they have for measuring what's going on, and you had to learn to live with the constraints of what they had. As this all gets kind of disaggregated and broken apart, and that the owner of the infrastructure gets to define the behavior in software, they can now chain together the modules and the pieces that they need in order to deliver the service. That's great, but now they've lost that proprietary measurement, so now they need to introduce the measurement that they can get greater visibility. This actually has created a tremendous opportunity and this is what we're demonstrating, is if you can come up with a uniform way of doing this, so that you can see, for example, the path that every packet takes, the delay that it encounters along the way, the rules that it encounters that determines the path that it gets, if it encounters congestion, who else contributed to that congestion, so we know who to go blame, then by giving them that flexibility, they can go and debug systems much more quickly, and change them and modify them. >> It's interesting, it's almost like the aspirin, right? You need, the headache now is, I have good proprietary technology for point measurement and solutions, but yet I need to manage multiple components. >> I think there's an add-on to what Nick said, which is the whole key point here which is the programmability, because there's data, and then there's information. Gathering lots and lots of telemetry data is easy. (John chuckles) The problem is you need to have it at all points, which is Nick's key point, but the programmability allows the DevOps person, in other words, the operational people within the cloud or carrier infrastructure, to actually write code that identifies and isolates the data, the information rather than the data that they need. >> So is this customer-based for you guys, the carriers, the service providers, who's your target audience? >> Yep, I think it's service providers who are applying the NFV technologies, in other words, the cloud-like technologies. I always say the real big story here is the cloud technologies rather than just the cloud. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And how that's-- >> And same for you guys, you guys have this, this joint, same target customer. >> Yeah, I don't think there's any disagreement. >> Okay. (laughs) Well, I want to get drilling to the whole aspirin analogy 'cause it's of the things that you brought up with the programmability because NFV has been that, you know, saving grace, it's been the Holy Grail for how many years now, and you're starting to see the tides shifting now towards where NFV is not a silver bullet, so to speak, but it is actually accelerating some of the change, and I always like to ask people, "Hey, are you an aspirin or you a vitamin?" One guest told me, "I'm a steroid. "We make things grow faster." I'm like, "Okay," but in a way, the aspirin solves a problem, like immediate headaches, so it sounds like a lot of the things that you mentioned. That's an immediate benefit right there on the instrumentation, in an open way, multi-component, multi-vendor kind of, benefits of proprietary but open, but the point about programmability gives a lot of headroom around kind of that vitamin, that steroid piece where it's going to allow for automation, which brings an interesting thing, that's customizable automation, meaning, you can apply software policy to it. Is that kind of like, can you tease that out, is that an area that you guys talking about? >> I think the first thing that we should mention is probably the new language called P4. I think Nick will be too modest to state that but I think Nick has been a key player in, along with his team and many other people, in the definition and the creation of this language, which allows the programmability of all these elements. >> Yeah, just drill down, I mean, toot your own horn here, let's get into it because what is it and what's the benefit and what is the real value, what's the upshot of P4? >> Yeah, the way that hardware that processes packets, whether it's in network interface cards, or in switching, the way that that's been defined in the past, has been by chip designers. At the time that they defined the behavior, they're writing Verilog or VHDL, and as we know, people that design chips, don't operate big networks, so they really know what capabilities to put in-- >> They're good at logic in a vacuum but not necessarily in the real world, right? Is that what you (laughs). >> So what we-- >> Not to insult chip designers, they're great, right? >> So what we've all wanted to do for some time is to come up with a uniform language, a domain-specific language that allows you to define how packets will be processed in interfaces, in switches, in hypervisor switches inside the virtual machine environments, in a uniform way so that someone who's proficient in that language can then describe a behavior that can then operate in different paths of the chained services, so that they can get the same behavior, a uniform behavior, so that they can see the network-wide, the service-wide behavior in a uniform way. The P4 language is merely a way to describe that behavior, and then both Netronome and Barefoot, we each have our own compilers for compiling that down to the specific processing element that operates in the interfaces and in the switches. >> So you're bridging the chip layer with some sort of abstraction layer to give people the ability to do policy programming, so all the heavy lifting stuff in the old network days was configuration management, I mean all the, I mean that was like hard stuff and then, now you got dynamic networks. It even gets harder. Is this kind of where the problem goes away? And this is where automation. >> Exactly, and the key point is the programmability versus configurability. >> John: Yeah. >> In a configurable environment, you're always trying to pre-guess what your customer's going to try to look at. >> (chuckles) Guessing's not good in the networking area. That's not good for five nines. >> In the new world that we're in now, the customer actually wants to define exactly what the information is they want to extract-- >> John: I wanted to get-- >> Which is your whole question around the rules and-- >> So let me see if I can connect the dots here, just kind of connect this for, and so, in the showcase, you guys are going to show this programmability, this kind of efficiency at the layer of bringing instrumentation then using that information, and/or data depending on how it's sliced and diced via the policy and programmability, but this becomes cloud-like, right? So when you start moving, thinking about cloud where service providers are under a lot of pressure to go cloud because Over-The-Top right now is booming, you're seeing a huge content and application market that's super ripe for kind of the, these kinds of services. They need that ability to have the infrastructure be like software, so infrastructure is code, is the DevOps term that we talk about in our DevOps world, but that has been more data-centered kind of language, with developers. Is it going the same trajectory in the service provider world because you have networks, I mean they're bigger, higher scale. What are some of those DevOps dynamics in your world? Can you talk about that and share some color on that? >> I mean, the way in which large service providers are starting to deliver those services is out of something that looks very much like the cloud platform. In fact, it could in fact be exactly the same technology. The same servers, the same switches, same operating systems, a lot of the same techniques. The problem they're trying to solve is slightly different. They're chaining together the means to process a sequence of operations. A little bit like, though the cloud operators are moving towards microservices that get chained together, so there are a lot of similarities here and the problems they face are very similar, but think about the hell that this potentially creates for them. It means that we're giving them so much rope to hang themselves because everything is now got to be put together in a way that's coming from different sources, written and authored by different people with different intent, or from different places across the Internet, and so, being able to see and observe exactly how this is working is even more critical than-- >> So I love that rope to hang yourself analogy because a lot of people will end up breaking stuff as Mark Zuckerberg's famous quote is, "Move fast, break stuff," and then by the way, when they 100 million users and moved, slogan went for, "Move fast, be reliable," so he got on the five nines bandwagon pretty quick, but it's more than just the instrumentation. The key that you're talking about here is that they have to run those networks in really high reliability environments. >> Nick: Correct. >> And so that begs the challenge of, okay, it's not just easy as throwing a docker container at something. I mean that's what people are doing now, like hey, I'm going to just use microservices, that's the answer. They still got stuff under the hood, but underneath microservices. You have orchestration challenges and this kind of looks and feels like the old configuration management problems but moved up the stack, so is that a concern in your market as well? >> So I think that's a very, very good point that you make because the carriers, as you say, tend to be more dependent, almost, on absolute reliability, and very importantly, performance, but in other words, they need to know that this is going to be 100 gigs because that's what they've signed up the SLA with their customer for. (John chuckles) It's not going to be almost 100 gigs 'cause then they're going to end up paying a lot of penalties. >> Yeah, they can't afford breakage. They're OpsDev, not DevOps. Which comes first in their world? >> Yes, so the critical point here is just that this is where the demo that we're doing which shows the ability to capture all this information at line rate, at very high speeds in the switches. (mumbles) >> So let's about this demo you're doing, this showcase that you guys are providing and demonstrating to the marketplace, what's the pitch, I mean what is it, what's the essence of the insight of this demo, what's it proving? >> So I think that the, it's good to think about a scenario in which you would need this, and then this leads into what the demo would be. Very common in an environment like the VNF kind of environment, where something goes wrong, they're trying to figure out very quickly, who's to blame, which part of the infrastructure was the problem? Could it be congestion, could it be a misconfiguration? (John laughs) >> Niel: Who's flow-- >> Everyone pointing finger at the other guy. >> Nick: The typical way-- >> Two days later, what happened, really? >> Typical way that they do this, is they'll bring the people that are responsible for the compute, the networking, and the storage quickly into one room, and say, "Go figure it out." The people that are doing the compute, they'll be modifying and changing and customizing, running experiments, isolating the problem. So are the people that are doing storage. They can program their environment. In the past, the networking people had ping and traceroute. That's the same tools that they had 20 years ago. (John chuckles) What we're doing is changing that by introducing the means where they can program and configure, run different experiments, run different probes, so that they can look and see the things that they need to see, and in the demo in particular, you'll be able to see the packets coming in through a switch, through a NIC, through a couple of VMs, back out through a switch, and then you can look at that packet afterwards, and you can ask questions of the packet itself, something you've never been able to-- >> It's the ultimate debugger. Basically, it's the ultimate debugger. >> Nick: That's right. Go to the packet, say-- >> Niel: Programmable debugger. >> "Which path did you take? "How long did you wait at each NIC, "at each VM, at each switch port as you went through? "What are the rules that you followed "that led you to be here, and if you encountered "some congestion, whose fault was it? "Who did you share that queue with?" so we can go back and apportion the blame-- >> So you get a multiple dimension of path information coming in, not just the standard stovepiped tools-- >> Nick: That's right. >> And then, everyone compares logs and then there's all these holes in it, people don't know what the hell happened. >> And through the programmability, you can isolate the piece of the information-- >> So the experimentation agile is where I think, is that what you're getting at? You can say, you can really get down and dirty into a duplication environment and also run these really fast experiments versus kind of in theory or in-- >> Exactly, which is what, as Nick said, is exactly what people on the server side and on the storage side have been able to do in the past. >> Okay so for people watching that are kind of getting into this and people who aren't, just give me in order maybe through of the impact and the consequences of not taking this approach, vis-a-vis the available, today's available techniques. >> If you wanted to try and figure out who it was that you were sharing a queue with inside an interface or inside a switch, you have no way to do that today, right? No means to do that, and so if you wanted to be able to say it's that aggressive flow over there, that malfunction in service over there, you've got no means to do it. As a consequence, the networking people always get the blame because they can't show that it wasn't them. But if you can say, I can see, in this queue, there were four flows going through or 4,000 flows, and one of them was really badly behaved, and it was that one over there and I can tell you exactly why its packets were ending up here, then you can immediately go in and shut that one down. They have no way that they go and randomly shut-- >> Can I get this for my family, I need this for my household. I mean, I'm going to use this for my kids. I mean I know exactly the bad behavior, I need to prove it. No, but this is what the point is, is this is fast. I mean you're talking speed, too, as another aspect-- >> Niel: It's all about the-- >> What's the speed lag on approach versus taking the old, current approach versus this joint approach you guys are taking? What's the, give me an estimate on just ballpark numbers-- >> Well there's two aspects to the speed. One is the speed at which it's operating, so this is going to be in the demo, it's running at 40 gigabits per seconds, but this can easily run, for example, in the Barefoot switch, it'll run at 6 terabits per second. The interesting thing here is that in this entire environment, this measurement capability does not generate a single extra packet. All of it is self-contained in the packets that are already flowing. >> So there's no latency issues on running this in production. >> If you wanted then change the behavior, you needed to go and modify what was happening in the NIC, modify what was happening in the switch, you can do that in minutes. So that you can say-- >> Now the time it takes for a user now to do this, let's go to that time series. What does that look like? So current method is get everyone in a room, do these things, are we talking, you know. >> I think that today, it's just simply not possible. >> Not possible. >> So it's, yes, new capability. >> I think is the key issue. >> So this is a new capability. >> This is a new capability and exactly as Nick said, it's getting the network to the same level of ability that you always had inside the-- >> So I got to ask you guys, as founders of your companies because this is one of those things that's a great success story, entrepreneurs, you got, it's not just a better mousetrap, it's revolutionary in the sense that no one's ever had the capability before, so when you go to events like Mobile World Congress, you're out in the field, are you shaking people like, "You need me! "I need to cut the line and tell you what's going on." I mean, you must have a sense of urgency that, is it resonating with the folks you're talking to? I mean, what are some of the conversations you're having with folks? They must be pretty excited. Can you share any anecdotal stories? >> Well, yup, I mean we're finding, across the industry, not only in the service providers, the data center companies, Wall Street, the OEM box vendors, everybody is saying, "I need," and have been saying for a long time, "I need the ability to probe into the behavior "of individual packets, and I need whoever is owning "and operating the network to be able to customize "and change that." They've never been able to do that. The name of the technique that we use is called In-band Network Telemetry or INT, and everybody is asking for it now. Actually, whether it's with the two of us, or whether they're asking for it more generally, this is, this is-- >> Game changer. >> You'll see this everywhere. >> John: It's a game changer, right? >> That's right. >> Great, all right, awesome. Well, final question is, is that, what's the business benefits for them because I can imagine you get this nailed down with the proper, the ability to test new apps because obviously, we're in a Wild West environment, tsunami of apps coming, there's always going to be some tripwires in new apps, certainly with microservices and APIs. >> I think the general issues that we're addressing here is absolutely crucial to the successful rollout of NFV infrastructures. In other words, the ability to rapidly change, monitor, and adapt is critical. It goes wider than just this particular demo, but I think-- >> It's all apps on the service provider. >> The ability to handle all the VNFs-- >> Well, in the old days, it was simply network spikes, tons of traffic, I mean, now you have, apps could throw off anomalies anywhere, right? You'd have no idea what the downstream triggers could be. >> And that's the whole notion of the programmable network, which is critical. >> Well guys, any information where people can get some more information on this awesome opportunity? You guys' sites, want to share quick web addresses and places people get whitepapers or information? >> For the general P4 movement, there's P4.org. P, the number four, .org. Nice and easy. They'll find lots of information about the programmability that's possible by programming the, the forwarding being what both of us are doing. In-band Network Telemetry, you'll find descriptions there, P4 programs, and whitepapers describing that, and of course, on the two company websites, Netronome and Barefoot. >> Right. Nick and Niel, thanks for spending some time sharing the insights and congratulations. We'll keep an eye for it, and we'll be talking to you soon. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> This is theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (lively techno music)