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Vieo

Jul 2001 to Dec 2002​

Employee: 1 year, 6 months

Role: Senior Software Engineer, Industry Representative

Technologies: C, InfiniBand

Project​

I joined Vieo because it was a start-up in a leading edge, highly technical area. I had the opportunity to work with a half-dozen previous co-workers, who I consider superstars.

Vieo developed a full stack of InfiniBand hardware and software solutions.

InfiniBand is a network technology used in high-performance computing (HPC) because of its high throughput and low latency. It is commonly used as a supercomputer interconnect.

Vieo closed the St. Paul, Minnesota office when venture capital funding dried up.

Challenges​

Creating hardware and software solutions for an emerging technology is difficult, at best. You are creating solutions for a market that does not yet exist.

The InfiniBand standard is descriptive, not prescriptive. Meaning the standard was open to interpretation.

Verifying interoperability is an N-squared problem. Every implementation needed to interconnect with every other implementation to verify that systems were compatible.

Activities​

Developed full-stack software in "C" that implemented the InfiniBand specification.

Voting member of the InfiniBand Hardware Management working group.

Co-authored the Hardware Management specification, specifically, the interface between the hardware layer and the software stack.

Results​

The Vieo solution was considered the InfiniBand gold standard.

Most companies, in this space, used our software to verify their their InfiniBand implementation.

As a Senior Software Engineer, I accomplished the following:

  • Wrote and shipped software to customers.
  • Represented Vieo on the InfiniBand Hardware Management working group.
  • Worked with industry leaders, such as Intel and Mellanox (now owned by NVIDIA), to advance InfiniBand as an interconnect technology, which is an alternative to Ethernet.