Features:

INTERVIEW WITH TARARI'S CEO RANDY SMERIK
by Alan Beck, Editor-in-Chief

Following is a Q&A with Randy Smerik, president and CEO of Tarari, Inc., which unveiled its Tarari High Performance Content Processor on July 24, 2003.

HPCwire: Who is Tarari?

Smerik: Tarari is San Diego, California-based company that was formed in 2002 as a spin-out from Intel Corporation's Network Equipment Division. Our content processors represent a third-generation “software in silicon” solution technology. We currently focus on content processing acceleration in areas like high performance computing, network security and XML-based web services.

HPCwire: What are you announcing in the Tarari High Performance Content Processor?

Smerik: Today, we are pleased to announce the introduction of the Tarari High Performance Content Processor for high performance computing (HPC) and other similar compute-intensive applications. Tarari Content Processors offload compute-intensive algorithms from servers, cluster nodes, and embedded processors, enabling VARs, ISVs and OEMs to increase the available cycles in new and existing clustered computing applications as well as individual servers and processors.

HPCwire: What market needs does the Tarari High Performance Content Processor address?

Smerik: There is a wide variety of market needs that the Tarari High Performance Content Processor can and does address. Market segments such as education, government, networking and industry can experience direct benefit from a Tarari solution. Drilling down, industry application areas that will find significant cost savings and return on investment due to the compute- intensive off-loading include: Biotech, Seismic, Communications, Entertainment and Financial/Commercial. Many of these market end-users and analysts in these markets continue to tell us that their applications are hamstrung by certain, extremely compute-intensive tasks. They want solutions that will relieve such bottlenecks by moving these tasks off of their host processors onto a much faster content processor to be run in parallel ­ Tarari provides the solution.

HPCwire: How will these acceleration technologies make life easier for users of high performance computing?

Smerik: Let's look at an example from the entertainment industry. Claymation ­ the technology used to make movies like DreamWorks / Aardman's Chicken Run. The software contains extremely compute-intensive algorithms. The animators find that the real bottlenecks in processing are not in any single motion rendering, but rather in calculating total environment changes to maintain realism, e.g. shadows, reflections, etc. If the application could push that set of calculations—which gets repeated many times per second—out to a Tarari High Performance Content Processor, the time to render and generate the animation would drop dramatically.

HPCwire: What form does the Tarari solution take?

Smerik: The Tarari Content Processor is a combination of hardware and software in silicon. The form-factor for installation into servers, appliances and /or network devices is a standards-based PCI card.

HPCwire: Why is this new?

Smerik: Individual, general-purpose processors work serially, so no matter how powerful the chips, they don't improve the performance by much more than the increase in their clock-rate and any performance improvement is limited by the speed of the serial processor. Tarari's third-generation content processors accomplish each task in parallel, resulting in huge time and cost savings. The processor accommodates reconfigurable logic, allowing it to be totally reprogrammed to suit new technology standards, or to execute completely new applications within an existing system.

HPCwire: What do your competitors need to fear from you? (i.e., Why is Tarari's solution different?)

Smerik: Our competitors should know we are serious about our solutions and what they can do for the market. It is an intense and fast-paced marketplace. We believe we have a key solution for the compute-intensive industries. Our solutions are, in effect, software in silicon. They are reconfigurable and offer a strong price-to-performance advantage through "production-ready" solutions.