 From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Supercomputing 17, brought to you by Intel. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Supercomputing 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. And 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. What does Falcon do for people that aren't familiar with the company? Yeah, Falcon Computing is an early stage startup. Folks on APGA-based acceleration development. Our vision is to allow software engineers to develop APGA-based accelerators without APGA expertise. Right, you just said you just closed your B round, so congratulations on that. Thank you. Yeah, very exciting. So it's a pretty interesting concept, you know, to really bring kind of the capability to traditional software engineers to program for hardware. That's kind of a new concept. What do you think, you know, because it brings the power of a hardware system but the flexibility of a software system? Yeah, so today to develop APGA accelerators is very challenging. So today, for the acceleration space, people use a very low level language like a barrier lock and the BHDL to develop APGA accelerators, which is very time consuming, very labor intensive. So our goal is to liberate them to use C++-based design flow to give them an environment that they are familiar with in C++. So not only they can improve their productivity, we also do a lot of automatic optimization under the hood to give them the highest quality of results. Right, so that really opens up the ecosystem well beyond the relatively small ecosystem that knows how to program the hardware. Definitely, that's what we are hoping to see. We want the tool to in the hands of all the 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, got the cards, this is a lot of pieces to the puzzle. So where does Falcon fit? So our main product is a compiler called a Merlin compiler. It's a pure C and C++ flow that enables software programmers to design APGA-based accelerators without any knowledge about 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 binary so they can run on APGA to see accelerated applications. Okay, and how long has Merlin been GA? Actually, we'll be GA early next year. Early next year, okay. So you're still finishing doing the final polish here and there. Yes, so in this quarter, we are heavily investing a lot of easy-of-use features. Okay. We have most of the features we want to be in the tool, but we're still lacking a little bit in terms of ease-of-use. So we are enhancing our report capabilities. We are enhancing our profiling 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 with some early adopters. Yeah, exactly. So today we provide 14-day free trial to any customers who are interested. We have it, you can set up in your enterprise or you can set up on the cloud. 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 kind of traditional data centers as well. Right, so yeah, our tool is already on AWS 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 is to where this is going to make the biggest impact. What type of application space has just been waiting for this solution? So our money compiler is a productivity tool. So any space that APGA 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 there can only be developed by hardware engineers. Now with the Merlin compiler, all these software engineers can use the Merlin compiler to do all these applications that's well suited for APJs. Okay, and when is it GA again? Now I know it's coming, when is it coming? Approximately, I want to know too. Probably the first quarter of 2018. Okay, that's just right around the corner. Exactly. All right, 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 headquarter. We also have an office in Los Angeles as well as Beijing, China. Okay, great. All right, 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. All right, he's Jim Wu, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Supercomputing 2017. Thanks for watching.