Bahrain's Exa.io Innovates in Cloud-Based 3D Rendering
3D rendering is the process film studios use to
turn the 1’s and 0’s of raw digital data into the images that
compose movies with animated components like Transformers and
Madagascar.
Anybody working with 3D visualization, in fact, including interior
designers, engineers, architects, ad agencies, and students uses 3D
rendering.
The only downside is that it takes an enormous
amount of time, says Mohamed Anwar Sheikhaldeen, the co-founder of
Exa.io, a cloud-based rendering
service. “Madagascar 3 took 65 Million compute hours across 19,200
servers! Even a student we served needed 40+ hours to render a
single shot for an interior design assignment.”
“Since it is an artistic job that is constantly refined, he or she
will often need to re-render all over again!” he adds.
Exa.io, the company he co-founded along with Zakaria M.
BenHamouche, and Ibrahim Mohamed Mokdad, provides affordable
cloud-based rendering 112 times faster than the average render
farm. Users can upload a project, render it, and download it at a
fraction of the time and cost.
Explaining the story behind the name, Sheikhaldeen says, “EXA is
the Greek scale of a ‘quintillion’ or a billion billions. So you
have Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta and EXA... Just like the space race in
the 60’s, there is a global race between now and 2020 to build an
EXA-scale supercomputer.”
“A supercomputer can do ‘EXA’ operations per second, so we aspire
to build user friendly and accessible technologies that are based
on cutting edge supercomputing technologies,” adds Sheikhaldeen,
who has been involved in 3 unsuccessful startups prior to Exa.io,
and is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist.
Starting Up in Bahrain
The Bahraini founders are all alumni of the University of Bahrain,
with Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Software
Engineering undergraduate and graduate degrees between them.
As individuals, they have won the Microsoft ImagineCup 2009
and the Zain Bahrain Telecom “ZainDream” Technology competition,
and as Exa.io, they recently won the Middle East Intel Business
Challenge 2012.
With an overwhelmingly positive market response to their service,
Exa.io’s biggest hurdle has been registering their business—a
sentiment that has unfortunately been echoed by many startups
registering in Bahrain due to high capital requirements and other
convoluted procedures.
Having been among the first batch to go through the 3-month
SeedStartup Accelerator
program in Dubai, it was ultimately their mentor who led them to
register in Delaware, USA.
Clearly astonished, Sheikhaldeen says: “In the tax-free state we
registered on day one; got the confirmation on day two, and on day
three I had the C-Corporation documents in my hands sent by FedEx.
Done!”
Sheikhaldeen, who continued to sing the praises of SeedStartup as
an accelerator that “outshines local startup efforts and
accelerators by several orders of magnitude!” said that today, now
that they can focus on execution, one of the biggest challenges
Exa.io is facing is building a supercomputer to boost their
bandwidth and processing power.
“It’s like building a space shuttle: a massive system of many small
parts that all must be working perfectly or the whole thing must be
halted. But when it works it’s a juggernaut!” he beams.
Sheikhaldeen adds, “We are all about building cutting edge
technologies here in the Arab World. We don’t believe in
following the path of the other technology leaders—that’s why you
won’t find us building another Google or Facebook.”
“We are proud to be the fastest rendering solution in the world
now—and we’re just getting started. We are currently working on
some other record-breaking initiatives which we’re hoping to
release soon!”
Wamda’s 2013 Mix N’ Mentor Roadshow will be coming to Manama on May 11, 2013.