Gnodal

» see gnodal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Gnodal's switches went into rooms I will never be let into: the new computing facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, a cluster at Leeds. They were built at 178-180 Hotwell Road in Bristol, by a company that lasted six years and seven months and was never called anything else.

Gnodal Ltd was incorporated on 9 March 2007, company number 06147615. Its founders were Fred Homewood, Tony Ford, Jon Beecroft, David Hewson and Ed Turner, with Matt Hatch joining that July. Most of them had come from Quadrics, the Bristol and Rome interconnect company that was itself assembled out of the wreck of Meiko Scientific, and two of them are credited on the QsNet II paper presented at Hot Chips in 2003. Homewood had been a chip architect at Inmos and STMicroelectronics before that. When Quadrics canceled its own Ethernet work late in 2007, more of its people walked down the road.

The idea was to take the tricks that high-performance computing had learned about interconnects and apply them to Ethernet, which is cheap and universal but congests badly under load. Gnodal designed its own ASIC, called Peta, fabricated by IBM on a 65 nanometer process, with 72 ports of integrated 10 gigabit PHY on the die. The switches went on sale at Interop in Las Vegas in May 2011. The headline number was latency: 150 nanoseconds from port to port on a 72-port box, and still only 414 nanoseconds across 6,480 ports five hops wide. The design scaled to 64,000 ports in a single flat layer-two fabric with no spanning tree, load-balancing inside the packet across cooperating chips. It was good enough to win Best of Interop in 2012 for a two-rack-unit box carrying 72 ports of 40 gigabit Ethernet, which at that moment was the densest thing anyone had shown. The company's own benchmark, running a deliberately cruel congestion pattern across a 512-port tree, put conventional Ethernet switching at an average 10 percent of peak bandwidth and its own scheme at 28 percent.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the administrators wrote down ~

By the end of 2011 Gnodal had raised about £9.1 million in share proceeds, from Adrian Beecroft and NESTA among others. It raised essentially nothing afterward. The share register at collapse shows 500 more shares than it had on 31 December 2011, so no round ever closed. Meanwhile £925,000 of preference shares carried mandatory redemptions of £462,500 on the last day of 2012 and the same again on the last day of 2013. The second one fell due twelve weeks after the company stopped existing.

The administrators from BDO wrote the cause of death down plainly, which is rare. Gnodal had sought aggressive US expansion, installing an American chief executive and sales team in a subsidiary called Gnodal Inc, and that operation "did not achieve sales orders sufficient to sustain its cost base and it became a drain on UK resources". The subsidiary owed the British parent about £2.03 million, every penny of it written down to nothing. The second finding was harsher: the market-leading position of Gnodal's technology "had been eroded over the calendar year, with competitors advancing future generation products over this period". The company had been for sale since March 2013. Woodside Capital approached about seventy parties and received no letter of intent; BDO approached eighty more and got four expressions of interest, all of them low enough to leave creditors short.

~ what cray wanted ~

Simon Girling and Graham Randall were appointed joint administrators on 4 October 2013, in the Bristol District Registry, case 711 of 2013. A preferred bid was supposed to complete on 16 October and collapsed that day, after meetings in which it emerged that key staff would not transfer. Five days later the sale went through to Cray UK Limited for $655,000, or £418,316, for the intellectual property. The directors' own statement of affairs had valued the patents at $200,000. The inventory did worse: £856,233 on the books, estimated to fetch £7,000, eventually sold for £40,533.

Cray announced it on 1 November, and the announcement is about people rather than parts. Ulla Thiel, its European vice president, said Cray was excited that the founders and key engineers had decided to join, and the transaction itself was described as the assignment of certain patents and design copyrights. All but one employee took the job. Cray's quarterly filing called the acquisition strategically significant but not material financially, and the figure never appeared in any American document at all. It exists only in a British insolvency file.

The administration converted to a creditors' voluntary liquidation on 22 September 2014. Unsecured creditors were paid 18.29 pence in the pound on 6 July 2015 and another 1.23 pence that September, and the Final Gazette dissolved the company on 9 January 2016. gnodal.com now redirects to an unrelated site that does not load. The work went to Cray, Cray went to HPE, and the Slingshot interconnect in today's supercomputers traces part of its heritage back to Hotwell Road, which the University of Bristol was still saying out loud as recently as this June.

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