We spent 30 minutes talking with Alex Stein, the CEO of Liquid Market Solutions, about SmartNICs, Network Attached Compute, AI, White Rabbit, and a whole host of other topics. See the Table of Contents below for more details.
Table of Contents
00:00 Hello & Welcome.
00:14 Introduction to Alex Stein and Liquid Market Solutions (LMS).
02:00 History, four startups, one DE Shaw-backed, and the path to 2Sigma.
02:40 2Sigma and building Alpha Capture.
05:20 Meeting Seth at Morgan Stanley.
06:00 Seth is pushing them towards producing an FPGA-based solution.
06:40 When Scott and Alex may have first met in 2009 while Alex was at 2Sigma.
08:00 How does LMS fit into the larger SmartNIC market?
10:20 A TOE, no session set up, as well as the other protocols.
11:25 Strength of partnerships, while remaining focused on their core differentiation.
12:40 Working with BittWare as a board design partner.
13:30 They have 19 patents around their core technology; they don’t license their IP.
14:30 Packaged their technology to directly address customer problems.
15:10 Network Attached Compute (NAC) from NIC to NAC.
17:10 Taking UberNIC beyond AI. Timestamping, White Rabbit, streaming, telco…
19:00 Working with CERN to synchronize time with a resolution of 20 picoseconds.
19:40 AI as a force multiplier.
22:10 News sentiment portal that leveraged AI, and the value of AI moving forward.
22:40 Challenges of SmartNICs in Financial, the complexity of FPGA programming.
23:40 Activation Energy and what is required to move to a programmable platform.
25:40 Customers can add their own logic on top of UberNIC.
26:50 Power, heat, and the challenges they pose.
28:40 Future timeline, roadmap, and the use of ARM.
29:15 Alex hinted at a possible future ARM-based offering.
29:25 UALink and silicon photonics for chip-to-chip.
30:40 Looking out five years.
32:40 Composable I/O, we’ve heard it before, it will be interesting where it goes.
33:00 CXL and how that fits moving forward.
34:00 Wrap up and thank you for listening.
