Rescale Inc., a startup developing software for running high-performance computing applications in the cloud, today announced that it has raised a $50 million funding round from Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and other prominent investors.

Rescale says its software is used by customers for tasks ranging from studying microscopic objects to designing supersonic passenger planes. 

The term high-performance computing application most commonly refers to scientific and engineering programs such as physics simulation engines. Such programs require vast amounts of computing resources to run at scale. They often also necessitate specialized chips, like graphics cards or central processing units with high core counts.

San Francisco-based Rescale has developed a software platform that enables organizations to run their high-performance computing applications in the cloud. Many popular scientific and engineering programs already support the major cloud platforms out of the box, but because of their complexity, deploying them manually can be difficult even for tech-savvy enterprises. Rescale says its platform eases the task.

Rescale provides a management console that enables customers to quickly spin up high-performance computing environments in their cloud of choice. Scientists and engineers can customize the hardware resources in an environment based on a project’s requirements. Engineers at an automaker using artificial intelligence to optimize the design of a car component, for example, could provision a deployment with Nvidia graphics cards. 

Rescale also provides users with other tools designed to ease their work. The platform includes preconfigured, cloud-optimized versions of more than 650 applications ranging from the popular TensorFlow machine learning engine to niche, industry-specific tools. The application catalog is complemented by file-sharing features that researchers and engineers can use to share the technical datasets they use in conjunction with their software tools.

For information technology teams, in turn, Rescale provides cloud cost monitoring features and cybersecurity controls. Administrators can use the features to ensure that the workloads deployed by the research and development department comply with company polices.

Beyond simplifying operations for companies that are already using the cloud, Rescale positions its platform as a way of easing cloud adoption for organizations still relying on on-premises infrastructure. The latter use case represents a potentially major market opportunity. Today, Rescale says, less than 20% of high-performance computing workloads run in the cloud. 

“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,” said Rescale Chief Executive Joris Poort. The startup’s software, Poort added, gives engineers “the ability to focus on R&D outcomes and speeding delivery of new innovation, instead of managing HPC infrastructure.”

Rescale’s customer base of more than 300 organizations includes the likes of Boom Technology Inc., which relies on the startup’s platform to help it design its upcoming supersonic passenger jet. Another user, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., is using the platform as the basis of a cloud-based semiconductor design platform.

Samsung’s Catalyst Fund venture capital arm participated in Rescale’s latest $50 million round alongside Microsoft and Nvidia.  Hitachi Ltd., Nautilus Venture Partners and Republic Labs took part as well. 

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