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On Sundays, staff writer Paul Wood spotlights a high-tech difference maker. This week, meet Laxmikant "Sanjay" Kale, 60, founder of Charmworks, which he developed as the director of the Parallel Programming Laboratory and a professor of Computer Science at the
The team
In addition to me, I have longtime staff member Eric Bohm and my senior Ph.D. student Phil Miller, along with my wife Lata as senior members on my team. The technology we developed at the university over many years, and many of them joined as interns during the summer.
How did you become an entrepreneur?
Well ... I am not sure yet I have become one yet. The next year will tell. My drive came from wanting to make sure the unique technology we developed over the years at the university is sustained and succeeds. But I also sensed a big opportunity: the world of technical computing in engineering and manufacturing industries is on the threshold of a phase transition. In the past, most companies used desktop computers for this, and a few used very large supercomputers. The power of numerical simulations to help improve engineering design is now increasingly being felt, and most companies will start using parallel machines consisting of many computers for these purposes. We want to be there to facilitate this transition.
What does your product do that nothing else does?
Parallel computing is about many computers working together to solve one problem faster. Programmers today are required to tell each computer its part of the work by providing it with a script of exactly what to do when, and which data to exchange with which other computer. But with this method, often, many computers end up waiting for one of them to finish its work. This is because the time its takes to do individual pieces of work cannot be predicted exactly. With our approach, the programmer essentially makes a to-do list, and marks which item depends on which other. Then our software automatically assigns work and data to all processors so that all of them are efficiently utilized all the time. This automation of resource management is something that is unique to our product. And it simplifies the life of a programmer.
What is the future of Charmworks?
Bright. We have an excellent initial funding from the Department of Energy, with which we are improving our product. We already have an important "early adopter" customer that I cannot name. In 2016, we expect to start a marketing campaign and gain a significant number of customers.
Tech tidbits ... from SANJAY KALE
Twitter handle?#hpccharm
Favorite app?Slack! It's a great collaboration tool.
Book or Kindle?It depends. For fiction, I still like curling in bed with a book. For non-fiction, and especially technical books, I like e-books, on my laptop or kindle.
Wearable electronics?I am waiting for a watch that can accurately monitor health parameters. It's not there yet.
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