Big data is like the oil of the digital age, with companies spending billions of dollars trying to turn it into something worth hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions of dollars. Doing this generally requires rooms or warehouses full of servers that turn the data into something usable, but a startup by the name of MapD has a better way, one that’s infinitely cheaper and performs better.
A few years ago, Todd Mostak was taking a database course at MIT and saved up some money to buy two midrange gaming video cards to run benchmarks for his final project. Today, that final project is the core of a cutting-edge startup that’s set to tackle Big Data in a radically different way. Todd is the CEO and co-founder of MapD, a startup uniquely situated in a space where there are virtually no competitors: hyper-interactive real-time visualization of massive amounts of data from sources like Twitter and Facebook. MapD uses graphics processing units (GPUs) to crunch Big Data — the sort that usually only rooms full of servers are able to do, but “at a fraction of the price of what a big cluster [of servers] would cost, with much greater performance,” Todd tells VB in an interview. “One server running MapD can scan data at rates exceeding a trillion rows per second –literally orders of magnitude faster than any other solution out there.”