SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rescale, the leading hybrid HPC cloud platform enabling intelligent computing for digital R&D, today announced it has closed $50 million in Series C funding from Hitachi Ventures, Microsoft’s M12, Nautilus Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Republic Labs and Samsung Catalyst Fund, bringing the company’s total funding to over $100 million.

Rescale is accelerating cloud adoption for the science and engineering community that is still largely on-premises in private datacenters. Massive markets and more than 80% of the verticals served by Fortune 500 are powered by HPC (total annual spend expected to reach $55 billion by 2024¹) and computer simulation (total spend estimated to reach $21 billion by 2025²). Many workloads in the overall scientific research and development category, estimated at $185 billion in 2020³, benefit from the advantages of hybrid public cloud and on-premises computing made possible by Rescale.

“Rescale is the first intelligent HPC cloud platform created specifically for digital R&D empowering the research scientists and engineers who are building the future,” said Joris Poort, CEO and co-founder at Rescale. “In the legacy on-prem HPC cluster world, engineers wait in queues for access to capacity so they can run their jobs, they wrestle with complex software and hardware configurations, and they are generally constrained by IT. Rescale gives engineers simple access to thousands of preconfigured software and hardware profiles, the on-demand capacity of the public cloud provider of their choice, and the ability to focus on R&D outcomes and speeding delivery of new innovation, instead of managing HPC infrastructure.”

Today, only 20 percent of HPC workloads run in the cloud⁴. The industry dramatically lags Global 2000 enterprise cloud adoption for many reasons. Rescale was founded to bring HPC workloads to the cloud to lower costs, accelerate R&D innovation, power faster computer simulations, and allow the science and research community to take advantage of the latest specialized architectures for machine learning and artificial intelligence without massive capital investments in bespoke new data centers.

Rescale was born out of experiences at Boeing, where co-founders Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie (now CEO and CTO, respectively) were aerospace engineers leveraging machine learning techniques to optimize the 787 wing structure. Their experience building a high performance computing simulation environment led to an epiphany that engineers and scientists around the world had similar requirements and were needlessly constrained by computing capability. Why not find a way to run complex workloads in the cloud, and accelerate their performance with specialized architectures? They founded Rescale to give the R&D and IT community the first hybrid cloud infrastructure platform optimized for HPC.

Rescale Backed by Leading Investors

SAMSUNG
“Computer simulation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are accelerating product design cycles in R&D domains across all industries,” said Shankar Chandran, Senior Vice President, and Managing Director, Samsung Catalyst Fund. “The ability to run the latest applications on state-of-the-art Cloud hardware, which take advantage of new specialized architectures, along with the ability to tap into unlimited Cloud capacity with on-demand burst capabilities, has a significant impact on the time-to-market. Rescale is a key enabler for those Enterprises wishing to accelerate R&D through use of a multitude of applications that are run on top of finely tuned compute and storage resources in the Cloud.”

M12 - MICROSOFT’S VENTURE FUND
"There’s a massive opportunity for enterprises to de-risk computing investments. In the move from on-prem HPC clusters to public clouds, capital expenses become operating expenses," said Nagraj Kashyap, Global Head of M12. “Rescale is a key enabler of enterprise digital transformation, bridging specialized HPC hardware and intelligent computing on modern cloud infrastructure."

Today the Rescale platform is the scientific community’s first cloud platform optimized for algorithmically-complex workloads, including simulation and artificial intelligence, plus integrations with more than 600 of the world’s most-popular HPC software applications and more than 80 specialized hardware architectures. Rescale allows any science engineer to run any workload, on any major public cloud, including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft Azure, Oracle and more. Today more than 300 customers already use the Rescale platform, including Aerion Supersonic, Amgen, AGC, Arrival, AZothBio, Bionano Genomics, Boom Supersonic, Denso, Dinex, Doosan, Gaon Chips, ISAR Aerospace, LS Industrial Systems, McCormick Stevenson, Modine, Optisys, Nissan, pSemi, Quadric.io, RWDI, Samsung, Sensatek, Specialized Bicycle Components, SSE Renewables, Toyo, Uniandes, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Customers Accelerating Simulations Building the Next Big Thing in HPC and AI

SAMSUNG (EDA)
"SAFE-Cloud Design Platform (SAFE-CDP™) by Samsung Foundry and Rescale is an exciting new paradigm for the semiconductor industry,” said Sangyun Kim, Vice President of Foundry Design Platform Development at Samsung Electronics. “We believe that enhancing customers' convenience by preparing an integrated system and pre-installing design tools from major EDA partners will be an essential step forward expanding cloud-based design infrastructure.”

SENSATEK (AEROSPACE)
Sensatek is a Daytona Beach, Florida- based company whose founder and CEO, Reamonn Soto, is a United States Marine Corps Veteran who won a National Science Foundation grant to launch his jet propulsion sensor startup. The company’s success in sensor technology for propulsion led to a rapidly- evolving new product portfolio that has extended into auto glass manufacturing, foundries, chemical and pharmaceutical use cases. By using the Rescale platform, Sensatek slashed in half the time it took (and eliminated huge up-front capex investment requirements) to run its product prototyping and design process -- which relies on computationally-heavy simulations across heat transfer, electromagnetic properties of materials, and other parameters.

“Reducing product development time by fifty percent by speeding up simulations has allowed us to expand into new markets and generate five new product roadmaps,” said Soto. “We don’t want to be in the business of becoming HPC hardware architecture specialists - we just want to leverage a platform that allows us to use the latest advances that speed up our simulations and get us the results we need to keep creating new IP, which is exactly what Rescale has done for our business.”

AERION (AI)
Early in his career, Alex Egeler designed systems that launch missiles from submarines. Today, as Executive Vice President, Aerion Technologies, he’s bringing together the best people and technology to enable sustainable supersonic flight at Aerion Supersonic, the company building the world’s first supersonic business jet – the 1000MPH AS2.

Aerion leverages a Digital Twin model as a virtual representation for its aircraft design, and trains machine learning models and artificial intelligence to surface simulation scenarios (structural dynamics, airplane angles, rudder deflections, weather, wind aerodynamics, etc.). Rescale gives Aerion instant access to the most popular AI / ML libraries (Tensorflow, Keras, Caffe2, PyTorch, Chainer, etc.), pre-configured to run on the latest HPC hardware (NVIDIA Tesla P100 and Tesla V100 GPUs, Intel Skylake Processors, InfiniBand Interconnect, 1TB+ RAM.

“We initially built our own cloud capabilities on AWS directly. But with all the one-off simulation jobs we needed to run for design, each would require going to AWS, spinning up instances, writing environments to specific job schedulers, and configuring the software and hardware,” said Egeler. “Then we discovered Rescale, which already has all these AI and ML architectures built for HPC which allowed us to run more simulations, far more efficiently and ultimately, accelerate our aircraft program to the final stages of validation.”

BIONANO GENOMICS
Recent events have placed a spotlight on the life sciences industry like never before, and genome analysis company Bionano Genomics has stepped up to provide the world with answers. Through their Saphyr system, Bionano Genomics makes it possible to identify previously undetectable variations in genome structure to accelerate the promise of personalized medicine relating to everything from COVID-19 to cancer.

“Bionano’s Saphyr system for genome analysis is becoming an important tool in clinical and research settings worldwide,” said Mark Oldakowski, COO of Bionano Genomics. “The deep analysis of structural variants for genetic disorders and cancers requires fast and inexpensive HPC. Through Rescale, Bionano is able to utilize mutli-cloud and regionalized HPC nodes that are secure and optimized for speed and cost. This provides Bionano's customers with on-demand computing capacity to help them scale while giving me the confidence that I'm offering the best available cloud solution."

About Rescale