Simulation Theory raises $2 million so computers stop wasting computing resources

Simulation theorya startup dedicated to reducing waste by optimizing computing resources, has raised $2 million in seed funding.

Simulation Theory technology allows companies to leverage their existing infrastructure more efficiently, reducing cloud computing costs by up to 40% by dramatically increasing application performance.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Anthony Castoro, CEO of Simulation Theory, said: “The company has technology that allows people to leverage all the power of their CPUs across any number of cores. With the advent of artificial intelligence and before that Web 3, the growth of demands on computing resources has risen dramatically, and we see the investments that people will have to make in power five, ten, 15 years down the road just to meet their needs. Data center needs.

He added: “Our argument is that you can’t build your way out of that problem. You also need to be more efficient. There is an opportunity in many of these cases to reduce their computing budget by 30% to 40%.”

Finance

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

The funding will be used to support further development of Simulation Theory’s innovative software development kit (SDK) designed to maximize applications’ ability to optimize existing resources to help companies save billions in excess spending on hardware and cloud usage each year.

In today’s digital landscape with the widespread adoption of generative AI and complex simulations, many companies increasingly rely on cloud services but suffer from the high prices associated with inefficient hardware usage.

“The digital revolution is over. Welcome to the age of optimization,” Castoro said. “As the demand on computing resources continues to rise, we cannot simply build our way out of the problem. Simulation Theory is a deep technology company founded to address the fundamental computing challenges presented by this new era. The Simulation Theory SDK allows customers to maximize the computing resources they already have, reducing costs, accelerating business outcomes, and promoting sustainable practices that can significantly reduce our carbon footprint.

Castoro said the fundraising was organic.

“We realize that creating software that scales with modern CPUs is difficult, and as a result the solution was to introduce more expensive hardware to solve the problem,” Randy Cooley, chief technology officer at Simulation Theory, said in a statement. “Our technology makes it easy for application developers to take full advantage of multi-core CPU architectures in every popular operating system. Some of our early customers have already increased their compute performance by several orders of magnitude, reducing time to completion by up to 90 percent on the same devices.

Origins

Cooley and Castoro have known each other for more than 15 years. Cooley was a game designer who was largely focused on delivering software that could make games shine in visual effects. Around 2018, Cooley began working on the multi-core problem.

“I’ve met great people throughout my career in the video game industry, and Randy is one of those people. We continue to gravitate toward each other,” Castoro said.

Cooley began focusing on the problem of parallel programming of multiple CPU cores back in the days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, when multi-core CPUs became popular.

“I basically started working on this issue around the Xbox 360 and PS3 days because you couldn’t feed the GPU fast enough to keep my renders going,” Cooley said.

He branched out into full system architecture and learned how to scale cores horizontally on a local piece of hardware, whether it’s an Xbox 360, a PC, or your phone. They all have multiple cores, he said, and very few programs use them well.

Although the disruption that multicore brought to the industry is ancient history, it had a long-lasting impact as many programmers never learned how to program across multiple cores. Multi-threaded software is not easy, and only a few people know how to do it in every company.

Cooley sought to create a program that could do this automatically so that programmers with limited knowledge would not have to learn code in parallel.

Solve the problem

“Unfortunately, it’s still really difficult to solve, and the problem is that getting programs to run in parallel is complicated and difficult. How do you organize and synchronize events so that you don’t have stalls or crash the CPU or introduce more instability? That’s something,” Cooley said. Really hard.”

GPUs are good at parallelism, but not good at making logical decisions. So CPUs are still very much essential in everything from games to large language models of AI.

“You’re going to have to have a mix of CPUs and GPUs,” Cooley said.

The result is that CPUs are the bottleneck and there must be software to speed them up by creating software that can optimize the utilization of CPU cores.

“We made it so that the CPUs are fully utilized,” Cooley said. “Why buy a 64-core CPU when the hardest thing ever is a video game that only uses six cores? There’s a lot of computing power sitting idle.”

Cooley solved the problem using custom scheduling software or proprietary technology, Castoro said. The company has applied for a patent for this technology. It takes the form of a software development kit (SDK) that developers can integrate into their applications, and makes it easy to parallelize the work the application does without having to solve really difficult parallel computing problems.

Visualize the problem

It can be difficult to envision what this could do for enterprise applications. But the games are a little easier. If you’ve ever played a game and there’s a lot going on on screen at once — for example, a lot of soldiers in one intense battle, or a lot of explosions and action — that puts a strain on your hardware resources, which can happen. To keep up with the need for fast 3D rendering. Parallel instructions spread across CPU cores can make this type of scene run more smoothly.

Another example is playing a split-screen game, where one player plays a cooperative game on one side of the screen and the other player uses the other side of the screen. This is a difficult problem because it is like running two games simultaneously with a single gaming device. The scenes on either side of the scene show different animations and thus the device has to display two different images simultaneously. Using multi-core again is the solution to this problem.

Such problems in the game are the root of the challenge, and Kohli helped solve them. Now the company is focusing on solving the same type of parallelism problem for enterprise and cloud applications. Castoro said that at a time when hardware is scarce and expensive due to the demand for artificial intelligence, this type of solution from Simulation Theory is timely.

“With AI, there are a lot of separate systems that you can integrate our scheduling software into and balance within those systems. Then you can also create those systems that actually run in parallel with each other without having to synchronize them,” Cooley said.

Customers in the organization

Customers including Secur3D, Encant AI, Perception Grid and Gameye are among the first Simulation Theory partners to evaluate the benefits of integrating Simulation Theory technology in terms of future cost savings and performance gains. The company is talking to a lot of hardware vendors as well.

Secur3D, a company that oversees and protects user-generated content, is changing how 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.

“Incorporating simulation theory will allow us to scale up in ways we thought would take years,” Nigel said.
Metcalfe, head of product at Secur3D. “We expect to increase our asset ingestion capacity by at least 20 times and believe this technology will change the way people anticipate, calculate and fulfill customer demand.”

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

Simulation Theory’s mission is to solve the most complex computing problems to save businesses billions. Founded in 2023 by Anthony Castoro and Randy Cooley, Simulation Theory uniquely enables companies to efficiently and sustainably leverage existing resources to maximize cost reduction, increase performance, and reduce environmental impact.

In the future, the company could create software that can do a better job of deploying software across graphics processing units (GPUs), Castoro said. In 2025, the company will release some official reports.

What’s in a name?

By the way, the company’s name is based on the idea that we live in the Matrix, and we do not know it. I asked Castoro: “Are you a believer?”

He replied: “You know what’s the point? Either way, honestly.”

More importantly, Castoro added, “If you’re going to try to create a simulation that’s so high-fidelity that you can’t tell the difference between reality, you’re going to have to use all the computational resources at your disposal. That’s what we enable people to do, and that’s why we chose this name.”

Perhaps the sad thing for Castoro is that the success of this startup may take him out of gaming, at least for a while.

“I think I’m a little bit. When we were looking at what conferences we were going to next year, we wondered if we were going to go to the game conference,” Castoro said.