MSC Malaysia Companies TAP-ping on New Accelerator Platform to Innovate

New Initiative to accelerate development of solutions by MSC Malaysia Status Companies’

KUALA LUMPUR, 6 December 2013 – In an effort to assist and accelerate the development process of market-driven local products, five Malaysian companies received support through the Technology Acceleration Programme (TAP). The initiative is the brainchild of a tripartite partnership between Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), MIMOS Berhad (MIMOS) and NVIDIA Corporation (NVIDIA).

Launched in April 2013, the initiative saw many applications from MSC Malaysia Status companies, five of which: TESS Innovation Sdn Bhd, N2N Connect Bhd, Cube Global Sdn Bhd, Phoenix Minds Corporation Sdn Bhd, and Data Micron Systems Sdn Bhd, were selected to participate in the programme after an intensive pitching session conducted in June 2013.

The Technology Acceleration Program 2013 Award Ceremony. (From left to right) Dr. Ettikan Kandasamy Karuppiah, Principal Researcher from MIMOS Bhd, Mr. Ian Chen, Professional Solution Group Manager for South East Asian (SEA) from NVIDIA Corporation, Ir Dr. Karl Ng, Director of Innovation Capital from Multimedia Development Corporation Sdn Bhd (MDeC), Mr. Babak Barkhordar, Product Manager, and Mr. Amirreza Zarrabi, Software Engineer from N2N Connect Berhad, Mr. YS Yap, Head of R&D and Mr. Peter Ong, Founder / Chief Technology Officer from Tess Innovation Sdn Bhd, Mr. Francis Tey, Chief Executive Officer / Co-Founder and Mr. Johnson Wey, Chief Technology Officer from Phoenix Minds Corporation Sdn Bhd.

The participants underwent a four-day training workshop for both basic and advanced Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming which was conducted by both MIMOS and NVIDIA experts. The training was aimed to familiarise the participants with CUDA programming and GPU Technology before moving on to the development phase of GPU applications. Each participant was also paired with a technical mentor who was on hand to assist the participants on adoption and development of GPU Technology prototypes.

In its pilot year, the TAP initiative assists local companies by establishing partnerships with relevant leading technology providers who together, have built an accelerated early adopter platform to enhance the knowledge on how best to leverage NVIDIA’s architecture with MIMOS’ technologies whilst these companies create their innovative solutions on graphics processing unit (GPU) computing technologies.

Dr. Karl Ng, Director of Innovation Capital, MDeC said “TAP offers a new platform for local companies and technology providers to work together and enhance their offerings by gaining as much knowledge, training and guidance in building and strengthening their solutions. These companies are exposed to already established and successful organisations that are ready and eager to support them.

“MDeC is proud to be part of this initiative as it contributes towards our aim to move Malaysia into a digital economy. This partnership serves to encourage upcoming business pioneers to further expand their offerings with the right tools,” he continued.

On 19th November 2013, the five participants presented their achievements that were derived from the programme to a judging panel. Each participant proudly demonstrated the improvements made with their system’s processing speed through parallel processing using NVIDIA GPU. The winning teams are as follows:

TAP Award Winner
• N2N Connect Bhd with their Strategy Optimisation Accelerator which is able to significantly increase the processing speed of stock trading data and reduce the processing time to around 1000%.

TAP Award 1st Runner-up Winner
• TESS Innovation Bhd with their Xcelerated Anti Money Laundering(AML) Watchlist Search via GPU which is able to reduce the task processing time of Watchlist Scanning by more than 100%.

TAP Award 2nd Runner-up Winner
• Phoenix Minds Corporation Sdn Bhd with their Personal Emergency Assistance Solution (PEAS) where an implemented mobile application will locate and alert the nearest person or neighbour whenever the user is in danger or in a life threatening situation.

Other TAP participants
• Cube Global Sdn Bhd with their Virtual Forest system which collates data from 20 million data points which are located on every tree in a specified forest.
• Data Micron Systems Sdn Bhd with their Development of aggregation engine with high performance GPU for ‘Big Data’ query processing. The solution implements backend processing which will increase the speed of ‘query processing’ by more than 100% in processing time reduction through an improved ‘query compression ratio’.

All five participants of the TAP initiative will now be able to showcase their complemented GPU products on the NVIDIA marketplace while the top three winners walked away with cash prizes.  For more information on the TAP initiative please contact MSC Malaysia Client Contact Centre (CliC) at 1-800-88-8338 or email clic@mdec.com.my.