Modern computing servers are amazingly powerful and Moore's Law continues unabated as CPU chips gain more cores and more processing capability. Yet it can be difficult for traditional software to take advantage of this phenomenal increase in capability. Gains in hardware performance are rarely translated into similar sized gains in business performance for many Internet companies.
Enter Concurix. Concurix is on a mission to build the most scalable manycore operating system for mobile, cloud, and web data centers. We are aiming for a 10x or better price performance advantage over traditional technologies, which should dramatically change the economics of data center computing.
The core technological bet behind this advance is an operating system built around functional programming. As is well known with Amdahl's Law, performance across multiple cores will be governed by reducing the number of serialization bottlenecks. From a practical engineering perspective this means reducing locks, minimizing shared state, and using parallel processes as much as possible. Functional programming languages as a class exhibit these properties and Erlang in particular is a very advanced and widely used system that has been battle tested across many high performance data center workloads.
We invite you to join our journey in the manycore world. Along the way we will be releasing the results of our work to both the open source community and as products. We are currently working on three fronts:
The founding team includes experts in operating systems, programming languages, big data, Internet applications and data centers. We are venture backed by GSharp, and have an amazing group of angel investors as well.
Alex Gounares is the founder and CEO of Concurix Corporation.
Prior to Concurix, Alex served as AOL's Chief Technology Officer. In this role, he lead all aspects of AOL's technology strategy, platform development and external technology partnerships. He was responsible for all of AOL's global engineering, IT, and operations functions. In addition, he served as a member of the company's Global Executive Operating Committee.
Alex joined AOL from Microsoft, where he was Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the company's Online Services Division. During his tenure at Microsoft, Gounares led significant strategic and technical operations for some of the company's most important projects including Microsoft's global advertising platform, Bing search, MSN and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Alex also served for three years as Technology Advisor to Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates, as well as Corporate Vice President of Corporate Strategy in Microsoft's Finance Department.
Prior to joining Microsoft in 1993, Alex worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has founded four startups and is also an inventor on more than 130 U.S. patents filed and pending. Alex holds a bachelor's degree cum laude in Computer Science from Princeton University.
Dr. Ying Li is the Chief Scientist for Concurix Corporation, and the winner of the 2012 ACM SIGKDD award for her outstanding contributions to the data mining field. She is driving the leading edge application of big data analytics to the operating system.
Before joining Concurix, Dr. Ying Li worked at Microsoft for over 14 years in a variety of roles including Data Scientist for SQL Azure, General Manager for Advertising Division, Privacy Officer for Online Service Division, General Manger for adCenter Labs, Data Mining Manager for Internet Tracking. While at Microsoft, Dr. Li had established the data mining services to MSN businesses worldwide, and was a key founding member of Microsoft’s adCenter business, had built adCenter Labs with close partnership with Microsoft Research, producing multiple mission critical algorithmic engines and solutions. The intelligent engines utilized large user bases, rich business intelligence assets, and advanced data and text mining technologies. Her leadership on Audience Intelligence has resulted in technologies and targeting products based on understanding of user, advertisement, and content, and serving as part of the foundation for the ad platform and the online services. Dr. Li has filed and holds over 50 patent applications in the area of data mining, machine learning, and computational advertising.
Outside Microsoft, Dr. Li is recognized for her contribution to the Data Mining Practice and Application community. She served as General Chair and Industry Program Chair for ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and co-chair for Internet Monetization track at WWW Conference, as well as serving on various program committees each year.
Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Li was a Technical Director at Computer Research Institute of Montreal, Canada, leading large research projects in the areas of knowledge modeling and management, image data base, map and document understanding, and real time natural scene object recognition systems.
Ying Li holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics from Peking University, Beijing China, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of British Columbia, Canada.
Russ Krajec has thirteen years experience as a design engineer prior to practicing patent law. After completing a Bachelor’s and Master’s at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Mechanical Engineering, Russ worked in St. Louis at McDonnell Douglas where he developed manufacturable designs for advanced composite materials, including radar absorbing materials. Russ moved to Colorado and designed manufacturing equipment for several industries, including disk drives and high vacuum manufacturing processes.
Russ spent several years at Hewlett Packard/Agilent Technologies as part of a small team of engineers who tackled test systems for various electronic devices, such as cellular phones, telephony switches, various radio transceiver devices, and other devices. Russ was awarded 18 patents for his designs at HP/Agilent.
Russ designed several high volume consumer products at Waterpik Technologies before passing the Patent Bar exam. Russ began practice as a patent agent and filed about 100 patent applications in various disciplines over a three year period at the law firm of William Cochran. In 2003, Russ began study at Denver University towards a Juris Doctor degree, which was awarded in December 2005. In the summer of 2004, Russ opened Krajec Patent Offices, LLC , serving clients in the mechanical, electrical, internet, and software fields.
Charlie Garrett is a co-founder and Software Engineer at Concurix Corporation working on the design of Concurix's scalable operating system and programming language runtime.
Prior to joining Concurix, Charlie was a Staff Software Engineer for Google in the Kirkland and Seattle offices. At Google, he worked on improvements to the web search index as well as internal tools and languages for analyzing data at web scale.
For seven years, Charlie worked as a Software engineer at Reservoir Labs, where he helped to design and implement high-performance compilers for C++ and Java targeted at architectures ranging from the x86 to VLIW to multi-core embedded systems.
Charlie holds a bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from Yale University and a master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington. After graduating, he worked as a staff programmer for both institutions on projects that included machine learning, biological modeling and extensible operating systems.
Ian Seyler joins Concurix from Return Infinity Inc., a Canadian-based company he founded in 2007. At Return Infinity, Ian was building an innovative exokernel-based operating system called BareMetal OS. The originality of BareMetal OS lies in the fact that it is written entirely in Assembly, yet retains essential modern features such as support for utilizing multiple CPU cores and networking. The goal of this project was to lead the way to more efficient cloud and high-performance computing applications, and Ian is excited to merge his vision with that of Concurix.
For the past 10 years, Ian has held a variety of positions with several major tech organizations in the heart of Canada’s technology centre that is home to RIM and Open Text, the beautiful Region of Waterloo, Ontario. Ian is best known for his intuitive developer skills at the machine code level.
Michael Noakes is a Software Engineer at Concurix Corporation with a focus on performance measurement and system optimization.
Michael began his career contributing to the development and evaluation of parallel computer architectures, most notably as a Research Scientist at MIT where he was a member of a small team that constructed an experimental fine-grained parallel computer, the J-Machine, under the leadership of Professor William Dally.
More recently, Michael was a senior developer at Amazon.com where he spent almost a decade focussing his attention on enhancing scalability and reliability; initially in the support of Amazon's product catalog infrastructure and then in the warehouse management systems.
Michael holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chris Fraser has worked on compiler code generation and optimization, code compression, and web indexing. He earned a BA in mathematics and computer science from Western Washingon in 1974 and a PhD in computer science from Yale in 1977. He was previously a professor of computer science at the University of Arizona and on the technical staff of Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, and Google. He is the author or co-author of one book, seven patents, and forty refereed technical articles.
You can contact us at info@concurix.com, +1.425.576.0300, or visit our headquarters at 244 Market St, Kirkland WA 98033.
