This startup aims to make massive supercomputers affordable for all

Saurabh Kumar Vij, a scientist who worked with the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN and his brother Gaurav Vij who is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher, have founded a company called Q Blocks that believes next innovation will be via supercomputers.

The focus markets for Q Blocks are the US, Canada and India - especially Bengaluru where they have connected with multiple data scientists and ML engineers.

"On our way to developing exa scale-level capabilities, our first stop was to make high-performance GPUs virtually stackable and remotely accessible by others. Though the idea of using someone's else's computer to fund own research is not new in the scientific world, with The Folding@Home project leading the race with our 1Exaflops of computing power," Saurabh told IANS.

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion (a quintillion) calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousand fold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008.

Q Blocks aims to provide access to affordable supercomputer experience and has built on technologies such as distributed and peer-to-peer computing.

Such an access will especially be useful for high performance computing applications such as ML model training, running simulations, or big data analytics, among other computer intensive applications, according to the company.

The founders aim at bringing supercomputing access to more than 5 million data scientists and designers and they expect that this affordability would further expand this market.

The company said it is launching subscription packages that would help users instantly launch their Jupyter Notebooks with pre-configured AI frameworks. This would include information on learning and testing more data science models.

Q Blocks is one of the 10 startups that successfully completed the mentorship-driven Techstars Bangalore Accelerator's 2020 programme recently.

"Techstars programme helped us in meeting people and companies which would have otherwise taken years to connect with. It's truly an accelerator from a networking and growth standpoint," said Saurabh.