Simulation Theory raises $2M so computers stop wasting compute resources

simulation theoryIt is a start-up company dedicated to reducing waste by optimizing computing resources and has successfully raised US$2 million in pre-seed funding.

Simulation Theory’s technology enables enterprises to more efficiently utilize their existing infrastructure, significantly improving application performance and reducing cloud computing costs by up to 40%.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Simulation Theory CEO Anthony Castoro said: “The company has a technology that allows people to take full advantage of the full power of the CPU on any number of cores. With the rise of artificial intelligence and Web3, the demand for computing The demand for resources is skyrocketing, and we’re seeing people have to invest in power over the next five, 10, or 15 years to meet the needs of the data center.

He added: “Our view is that you can’t solve this problem on your own. You also need to be more efficient. In many of these cases, they have the opportunity to reduce the computing budget by 30 to 40 percent.

Funding status

The round was led by Russ, August & Kabat managing partner Larry Russ, and included individual investors including former Finger Food Advanced Technology Group CEO Ryan Peterson and Strategy Alternatives’ Robert Wallace.

The funding will be used to support further development of Simulation Theory’s innovative software development kit (SDK), which is designed to help companies save billions of dollars annually in hardware and software by maximizing the ability of applications to optimize existing resources. Cloud usage expenditures.

In today’s digital environment, with the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence and complex simulations, many enterprises are increasingly relying on cloud services, but still face skyrocketing prices due to inefficient use of hardware.

“The digital revolution is over. Welcome to the age of optimization.” “As demand for computing resources continues to soar, we can’t simply build our own solutions to problems. Simulation Theory is a deep technology company founded to Solve the fundamental computing challenges of the new era. The Simulation Theory SDK enables customers to maximize the use of computing resources they already have, reduce costs, accelerate business results and promote sustainable practices, thereby significantly reducing our carbon footprint.

Castoro said the fundraiser was organic.

“We know that creating software that scales on modern CPUs is challenging, so the solution is to use more expensive hardware to solve the problem,” Randy Culley, chief technology officer of Simulation Theory, said in a statement. “Our technology makes it easy for application developers to take full advantage of multi-core CPU architectures on every popular operating system. Some of our early customers have improved their computing performance by orders of magnitude, and will do so on the same hardware. The time is reduced by 90%.

origin

Castoro has known each other for more than 15 years. Culley is a game designer with a strong focus on rendering software that makes games visually shine. Around 2018, Culley began working on the multi-core problem.

“I’ve met a lot of talented people throughout my career in the video game industry, and Randy is one of them. We just kept drawing to each other,” Castoro said.

As early as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, when multi-core CPUs became popular, Culley began to pay attention to the issue of parallel programming for multiple CPU cores.

“I basically started solving this problem in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era because you couldn’t feed data to the GPU fast enough to keep my rendering going,” Culley said.

He dabbled in complete system architecture and learned how to scale the core horizontally on native hardware, whether it was an Xbox 360, PC, or mobile phone. They all have multiple cores, but few programs take advantage of them well, he said.

While the industry disruption caused by multi-core is ancient history, it has had a lingering impact because many programmers never learned how to program across multiple cores. Multithreading software is not easy, and only a few people in every company know how to do it.

Culley sought to create software that could do this automatically so that programmers with limited knowledge would not have to learn parallel programming.

solve problems

“Unfortunately, this is still a very difficult problem to solve, and the problem is that it is complex and difficult to make programs run in parallel. How do you organize and synchronize events so that you don’t stall or crash the CPU or introduce more instability? Kali said. “That’s really hard to do. “

While GPUs are good at parallelism, they are not very good at logical decision-making. Therefore, from games to large language models for artificial intelligence, CPUs are still very necessary.

“You have to mix CPU and GPU,” Culley said.

The result is that the CPU becomes the bottleneck, and software must be written to speed them up by writing programs that optimize CPU core usage.

“We do this to get better utilization of the CPU,” Culley said. “Why buy a 64-core CPU when the most taxing thing you can do is play video games that only use 6 cores? That’s a lot of computing power sitting idle.

Castoro said Cali solves this problem through customized schedulers or proprietary technology. The company has applied for a patent on the technology. It comes in the form of a software development kit (SDK) that developers can incorporate into their applications and easily parallelize the work the application is doing without having to solve the really thorny parallel computing problem.

Visualization problem

It might be hard to imagine what this could do for enterprise applications. But playing games is easier. If you’ve ever played a game where there’s a lot going on on the screen at once (for example, a big battle with a lot of soldiers, or a lot of explosions and movement) that puts a strain on your hardware resources, this might As a result, it cannot meet the demand for fast 3D rendering. Parallel code distributed across CPU cores can make this scenario run more smoothly.

Another example is playing a game using split screen, where one player plays a cooperative game on one side of the screen while the other player uses the other side of the screen. This is a difficult problem to solve because it’s like using a console to run two games at the same time. The scenes on either side of the screen display different animations, so the hardware must render two different images simultaneously. Multi-core utilization is once again the solution to this problem.

These types of gaming issues are where the challenges originate, and Kali helps solve them. Now the company is focused on solving the same kind of parallelism problems for enterprise and cloud applications. Castoro said this solution from simulation theory is timely at a time when the demand for artificial intelligence has made hardware scarce and expensive.

“With artificial intelligence, you can integrate our scheduler into many discrete systems and parallelize them across those systems. And then you can also have these systems actually run in parallel with each other without having to synchronize between them.

Intra-enterprise customers

Customers including Secur3D, Encant AI, Perception Grid and Gameye are initial partners of Simulation Theory, evaluating the benefits of integrating Simulation Theory technology in terms of future cost savings and performance improvements. The company is also in talks with a number of hardware suppliers.

Secur3D, a company that manages and protects UGC, is changing the way platforms, creators and brands protect their 3D assets from infringement and unauthorized use. By leveraging simulation theory, Secur3D is poised to rapidly scale its operations.

“Integrating simulation theory will allow us to scale in ways that we thought would take years,” Nigel said
Metcalf, product lead at Secur3D. “We expect to increase our asset absorption capacity by at least 20 times and believe this technology will transform the way people predict, calculate and serve customer needs.”

Simulation Theory also recently launched a pilot program to test the effectiveness of the technology in enterprise applications across a variety of industries.

Simulation Theory’s mission is to solve the most complex computing problems and save companies billions of dollars. Founded in 2023 by Castoro and Culley, Simulation Theory’s proprietary SDK uniquely helps companies efficiently and sustainably utilize existing resources, minimize costs, improve performance and minimize environmental impact.

In the future, the company can create software that can better spread programs across graphics processing units (GPUs), Castoro said. In 2025, the company will release some white papers.

What’s in the name?

By the way, the company’s name comes from the idea that we live in a matrix and don’t know it. I asked Castoro, “Are you a believer?”

He responded, “You know, what’s the point? Anyway, let’s be honest.

More seriously, Castoro added, “If you’re trying to create a simulation that is so high-fidelity that you can’t tell the difference between it and reality, then you have to use all the computing resources available to you. That’s It’s what we enable people to do, that’s why we chose the name.

Perhaps sadly for Castoro, the startup’s success may push him out of the game, at least temporarily.

“I guess I’m a little bit [sad]. When we were thinking about conferences to attend next year, we wanted to know if we would be in a gaming conference,” Castoro said.