Created by: Tornado Staff
SciEngines secures funding for its supercomputers
Early-stage VCs High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and New Commercial Room have backed the German startup SciEngines with a round of funding.
SciEngines offers a platform for high-performance computing for software vendors. The company’s supercomputers are based on a fundamentally different architecture than standard PC architectures like the von Neumann computers. SciEngines claims that its massively parallel field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based architecture enables the use of the computational performance of supercomputers in a standard PC’s form factor and power consumption.
Important target markets for the company are life sciences and bioinformatics, which are increasingly subjected to enormous databases and a lack of computational performance. The growth in data volume a result of techniques like virtual screening, drug discovery, molecular biology and analytics is way beyond the growth of computing performance. With its fast and scalable platform SciEngines hopes to offer a solution. Its customers are both end users as well as bioinformatics service and solution providers.
In addition to the increased computation power of standard PCs and PC-clusters SciEngines’ products also makes the power-consuming discipline of bioinformatics ‘greener’. A single machine consumes as less energy as one personal computer and - for certain algorithms - can offer the computational performance of an entire computing center. To make transitions as easy as possible SciEngines offers their clients services for adopting custom algorithms.
The financial support by HTGF will allow for the development of a new product line optimized for bioinformatics which will be brought to market under the brand RIVYERA. "The team of SciEngines has shown that they are capable of developing high performance computers with their existing product line for cryptanalysis. The market of bioinformatics seems to fit perfectly to the upcoming products of SciEngines", stated Klaus Lehmann, senior investment manager of HTGF.
| 
