New supercomputing-class technology from Bitfusion boosts application performance by up to 100x without need for software rewrite or specialized skills
Innovative tools help companies in industries such as pharmaceutical, financial services and machine learning gain market advantage by conducting high-volume computations much faster without adding server capacity
Austin, TX – Bitfusion, a new company delivering powerful hardware acceleration technologies to boost application performance, today announced that it has been selected as a finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt 2015’s prestigious Startup Battlefield, and has closed its seed round of financing worth $1.45 million. The company received praise for its innovative technology, which automatically utilizes the underlying hardware infrastructure—any mix of CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs—to boost application software performance by up to 100X without any code re-write or specialized skills. The solution offers data-intensive organizations supercomputing-class capabilities with a platform layer that features custom software, performance-portable libraries and hardware appliances to provide unprecedented levels of acceleration.
“Many enterprises miss the potential in their infrastructure: There’s always a high level of underused capacity, and our solution is designed specifically to identify existing hardware capabilities, implement optimized software packages for active applications, and achieve greatly enhanced performance,” said Subbu Rama, CEO of Bitfusion. “Expensive horizontal scaling doesn’t have to be the default choice. By accelerating the existing hardware and significantly boosting software performance, businesses can fundamentally revise their essential operating practices, cut costs and pursue new market opportunities. That’s why we’re excited to bring this solution to market.”
The Bitfusion solution is custom-built for a business environment in which the sheer volume of incoming data—with multiple formats, hardware form factors, applications and social media channels—puts an unprecedented strain on the infrastructure. Most organizations see aggressive horizontal scaling as the only option, but adding server nodes typically drives up operating costs, inefficiencies and technical complications. By contrast, powering the hardware with options such as FPGA and GPU hardware accelerators enables high-performance computing to be conducted more easily, inexpensively, and quickly via the Bitfusion platform.
Bitfusion also enables increased performance on commodity cloud environments and simple application deployment to more exotic hardware configurations. Users are able to leverage the unique strengths of CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs in highly integrated and optimized systems to accelerate performance by several orders of magnitude.
Financial Backing
Bitfusion just closed a round of seed financing worth $1.45M from a group of highly respected venture firms. These include Data Collective VC, which invests in entrepreneurs building Big Data companies; Resonant VC, which invests in cloud infrastructure companies; and the Geekdom Fund, which invests in early-stage IT startups. Bitfusion also recently graduated from Techstars Cloud, part of the Techstars global ecosystem that empowers entrepreneurs to bring new technologies to market wherever they choose to build their business.
“We’ve found that many of our portfolio companies—particularly those applying algorithms to transform diverse industries that range from security and healthcare to agriculture and drug discovery—have an almost unlimited appetite for supercomputing capabilities,” said Matt Ocko, co-founder and co-Managing Partner of Data Collective Venture Capital. “We invested in Bitfusion because this technology dramatically improves the price/performance equation for these companies and their Fortune 500 partners, even making supercomputing cost-effective in branch offices in the Third World. We’re excited to see Bitfusion unlock the kind of innovation that’s currently confined to elite research labs by making these capabilities economically viable on a global basis.”
Technology
Bitfusion implements unique software technologies to expose the benefits of hardware accelerators such as FPGAs to boost application performance by up to 100x—transparently, automatically, and without application rewrite. Bitfusion can even accelerate applications on existing infrastructures (using standard CPUs) by leveraging underutilized hardware capabilities. By offering high levels of performance with zero-friction migration to more advanced hardware technologies, Bitfusion brings supercomputing-class performance to a wide audience.
The Bitfusion product line includes:
• Bitfusion Boost: Speed up existing clouds and data centers using Bitfusion software acceleration to automatically take advantage of all available resources.
• Bitfusion Appliance: Accelerate applications up to 100x in existing data centers using Bitfusion appliances consisting of hardware accelerators with software libraries.
• Bitfusion Supercloud: On-demand access to hardware accelerators such as FPGAs in the cloud, along with a large set of libraries for rapid application acceleration.
Management Team
• Subbu Rama, Chief Executive Officer: Subbu has held leadership roles in hardware and software divisions at global conglomerates, building CPUs, micro-servers, SoCs and cloud configurations. He was most recently a founding member of Dell’s first Cloud Infrastructure Marketplace business and helped build the product and engineering team.
• Maciej Bajkowski, Chief Operating Officer: Maciej is an engineering veteran who has worked at Intel, Samsung, Freescale and Dell, among other companies, and his work has focused on the hardware design of high-speed components, memory systems and storage solutions. He holds several patents in this field.
• Mazhar Memon, Chief Technology Officer: Over the course of a long career, Mazhar has built extensive experience in networking architectures, software performance optimization and large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The bulk of his work has been at Intel, where he served in multiple technical leadership and architecture roles.
Availability
Bitfusion is now available publicly. Sign up for early access at Bitfusion.io.
About Bitfusion
Bitfusion uses hardware acceleration to boost application performance by up to 100x—without having to write any code. Bitfusion offer supercomputing-class performance with a platform layer that features custom software, performance-portable libraries and hardware appliances to provide unprecedented acceleration in the existing infrastructure without user code rewrite or specialized skills. For more information visit: www.bitfusion.io
Media Contact:
Eric Goldman
917-224-9861
[email protected]
