FlyElephant is a creative laboratory for scientists and engineers. Part 1. The history of creation
Hi, Habr!
My name is Dmitry Spodarets. Today I begin a series of articles about the service FlyElephant , the founder of which I am. How it all began, the functionality and the current state of the project, the beta program and our conference AI & BigData Lab , as well as many other things , you will learn from the next publications.
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FlyElephant provides researchers and engineers with an environment to run computational programs. Thanks to catalogs of templates, algorithms, data and other components of FlyElephant, the process of developing programs and interacting with them is simplified.
University, recent courses, work in the laboratory - this is a golden time for creativity. This is where it all began.
Working in a university lab to develop a smoke plasma simulation system, our research team built a cluster on which the cloud was deployed using OpenStack. Some of the resources were used for our calculations, and some were given to GRID. Working with virtual machines and their configuration, as well as performing the calculations were mainly performed via the console. Instead of dealing with scientific issues, I had to spend time on the routine tasks of working with the cluster.
On one of the hackathons, namely, at Kyiv Startup Weekend II, I tried to solve this problem and create a service that automates the execution of scientific calculations. As a result, the team took 3rd place. Ideas startups FlyElephant started.
But after the hackathon, life began to make its own adjustments. Since I wanted to build a startup, and not to create another technical solution, I had to study a lot of new material on IT entrepreneurship. Considering that the project is rather narrowly specialized, it was necessary to learn to communicate to investors and non-technical people in an understandable language. In addition, it was necessary to build hypotheses of possible business models, initial marketing and much more. There was a lot of work, but it was interesting.
In August 2014 , the concept of the idea was fully developed and we began to develop a prototype service and test the prepared hypotheses. The updated team enthusiastically set to work. Startup FlyElephant has begun.
The first exit to the world took place at the largest conference in Ukraine on Internet technologies and innovations - IDCEE . The result was a large number of feedbacks from non-technical people, contacts and confirmation that we are going in the right direction - winning the nomination for Best Cloud Startup .
Then - participation in several other events, both core (FOSS Sea, AI Ukraine), and for IT entrepreneurs (StartUP Day, StartUP Lab). Passed the GrowthUP accelerator training program and eventually got into the accelerator itself.
In parallel with the participation in the events, the development team actively wrote the code. We managed to change several designs of our landing page, rewrite most of the texts, making them more understandable, and also add the minimum functionality of our system to begin alpha testing and subsequently launch the closed beta program.
Today we are developing a new functionality (I’ll write about the capabilities of the system in the near future), prepare for holding a conference on artificial intelligence and large AI on May 23 in AI & BigData Lab , where we plan to organize our first public presentation of the project, as well as increasing the number of partners.
In the comments I am happy to answer all questions.
Join us on Facebook and Twitter , and subscribe to our newsletter .
My name is Dmitry Spodarets. Today I begin a series of articles about the service FlyElephant , the founder of which I am. How it all began, the functionality and the current state of the project, the beta program and our conference AI & BigData Lab , as well as many other things , you will learn from the next publications.
')
FlyElephant provides researchers and engineers with an environment to run computational programs. Thanks to catalogs of templates, algorithms, data and other components of FlyElephant, the process of developing programs and interacting with them is simplified.
From idea to prototype
University, recent courses, work in the laboratory - this is a golden time for creativity. This is where it all began.
Working in a university lab to develop a smoke plasma simulation system, our research team built a cluster on which the cloud was deployed using OpenStack. Some of the resources were used for our calculations, and some were given to GRID. Working with virtual machines and their configuration, as well as performing the calculations were mainly performed via the console. Instead of dealing with scientific issues, I had to spend time on the routine tasks of working with the cluster.
On one of the hackathons, namely, at Kyiv Startup Weekend II, I tried to solve this problem and create a service that automates the execution of scientific calculations. As a result, the team took 3rd place. Ideas startups FlyElephant started.
But after the hackathon, life began to make its own adjustments. Since I wanted to build a startup, and not to create another technical solution, I had to study a lot of new material on IT entrepreneurship. Considering that the project is rather narrowly specialized, it was necessary to learn to communicate to investors and non-technical people in an understandable language. In addition, it was necessary to build hypotheses of possible business models, initial marketing and much more. There was a lot of work, but it was interesting.
In August 2014 , the concept of the idea was fully developed and we began to develop a prototype service and test the prepared hypotheses. The updated team enthusiastically set to work. Startup FlyElephant has begun.
The first exit to the world took place at the largest conference in Ukraine on Internet technologies and innovations - IDCEE . The result was a large number of feedbacks from non-technical people, contacts and confirmation that we are going in the right direction - winning the nomination for Best Cloud Startup .
Then - participation in several other events, both core (FOSS Sea, AI Ukraine), and for IT entrepreneurs (StartUP Day, StartUP Lab). Passed the GrowthUP accelerator training program and eventually got into the accelerator itself.
In parallel with the participation in the events, the development team actively wrote the code. We managed to change several designs of our landing page, rewrite most of the texts, making them more understandable, and also add the minimum functionality of our system to begin alpha testing and subsequently launch the closed beta program.
Today we are developing a new functionality (I’ll write about the capabilities of the system in the near future), prepare for holding a conference on artificial intelligence and large AI on May 23 in AI & BigData Lab , where we plan to organize our first public presentation of the project, as well as increasing the number of partners.
In the comments I am happy to answer all questions.
Join us on Facebook and Twitter , and subscribe to our newsletter .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/256945/
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