​By David Murphy, KAUST News

KAUST Ph.D. graduate Kiran Narayanan (M.S., Ph.D. '18, mechanical engineering) made use of his entrepreneurial spirit when he and his Ph.D. supervisor KAUST Professor and Acting Dean of Physical Science and Engineering Ravi Samtaney created UnitX, a University-funded supercomputing startup. 

UnitX harnesses both of its founders' supercomputing expertise to provide customized products and services on the UnitX online software platform for its varied client base. In turn, these products help companies across several industry verticals, such as finance and insurance, government, retail, telecoms, healthcare and logistics and manufacturing in two ways: to make data-driven decisions by adopting big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI); and to design better products in a swift manner by adopting a simulation-assisted prototyping approach that relies on parallel computing.

"A typical supercomputer has 50,000 times the number of processors compared to a laptop and has larger data storage capacity and faster interconnects," Narayanan explained. "What that means is that a calculation that may take up to a year on a laptop can be done within a day on a supercomputer because [supercomputers] can crunch more information faster. However, they cost millions of dollars and require large and skilled teams of engineers to operate. As a result, only the largest companies have had access to the massive potential supercomputers offer [in order] to innovate."

"UnitX aims to change that," he continued. "We want to democratize supercomputing by delivering it on demand in a cloud-like business model along with an easy browser-based user experience so that non-experts can use supercomputers and reap the benefits of accelerated innovation. The global market for supercomputing as a service has been estimated to be $224 billion [and is] growing at 25 percent year-on-year."

The UnitX team, including co-founders KAUST Professor Ravi Samtaney (first on left) and KAUST graduate Kiran Narayanan (M.S., Ph.D. '18) (second on right), work together on campus on their startup. Photo by Ryan Yangyang.

The UnitX team

"Our team has experience in the four pillars that constitute supercomputing: computer architecture; algorithms; expertise with front-end supercomputing applications; and big data," Narayanan said. "We want to help regional enterprises save costs and increase productivity by facilitating the move to a fully infrastructure-agnostic IT paradigm that integrates their on-premise computing infrastructure (if any) with supercomputing centers and public clouds."

"Together, these machines constitute a variety of hardware configurations that are each suitable for different tasks, such as training machine learning models and physics-based simulations," he added. "As a result, we help data scientists and engineers focus on business outcomes instead of dealing with the complications of hardware and software management, and [we] therefore ensure long-term sustainability of their AI and simulation-based prototyping initiatives."

Created from a difference in perspective

"As a member of Professor Ravi Samtaney's Fluid and Plasma Simulation Group, I had a rigorous learning experience in the tricks of the trade of developing software for supercomputing," Narayanan said.

It was during his Ph.D. that Narayanan discovered he and Samtaney's views differed in regards to the study of science for applied research purposes versus fundamental research purposes.

KAUST Professor Ravi Samtaney (pictured) heads the University's Fluid and Plasma Simulation Group. Photo by Ryan Yangyang.

"Along our journey, we grew our team, and Ankita Shree, a member of the KAUST community, joined us as our CFO and brought several years of experience in finance and business law that [are] vital to business operations and negotiations," Narayanan continued. "In fact, the complementarity and legal-financial mindset that Ankita brings has been a core strength of our team."

Support from KAUST

UnitX's founders were assisted by the University, which helps budding entrepreneurs and provides the infrastructure, resources and workforce necessary for innovation to thrive. The invaluable mentorship provided by the KAUST Entrepreneurship Center during events like the University's TAQADAM Accelerator Program helped Narayanan and Samtaney refine their business concept and model and understand their customers' needs.

"They say entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down," Narayanan noted. "The KAUST Entrepreneurship Center and the staff at Innovation and Economic Development gave us the motivation and courage to make that 'jump' and the ability to quickly iterate the design of our 'plane.' They helped us with the resources and business know-how to build a fully functional plane."

"KAUST has the correct infrastructure to help upcoming entrepreneurs," he continued. "During my time here, I have been a user of the state-of-art computer infrastructure available through the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory and a keen attendee of many of their workshops, which has contributed immensely to my learning curve."

UnitX co-founder Kiran Narayanan noted the University's supercomputing power helped him learn much during his time at KAUST. Photo by Anastasia Khrenova.

Bringing down the 'barriers' to efficient supercomputing

UnitX aims to foster its unique capabilities for localized change in supercomputing by partnering with several institutions and R&D centers in-Kingdom and in the MENA region to build a fully integrated supercomputing platform to enable customers to "compute and pay as they go."

"We break the 'barriers' of cost and skill for the adoption of supercomputing through our software platform that provides easy-to-use workflows for big data analytics, AI and simulations," Narayanan explained. "We do not own the supercomputers that are connected to our platform. Instead, we partner with institutions with supercomputers—[for example,] KAUST and King Abdulaziz University—that have spare capacity on their machines and make it available to end users who need it. This makes UnitX very scalable because we are not as capital-intensive as a 'traditional' business."

The UnitX team credits KAUST, the University's Entrepreneurship Center and the team from KAUST Innovation and Economic Development with helping them build a successful startup. Photo by Ryan Yangyang